Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters | Hacker News Reader

Developers are burned out, quitting jobs and creating a crisis for recruiters

worklife.news

111 pointscodyde127 comments

> A report from software platform LaunchDarkly revealed that nearly 7 in 10 developers (67%) have left a job due to pressure around minimizing deployment errors or know someone who has.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the statement, but this is a biased-as-hell source for this statement given that LaunchDarkly's product is feature-flag-management (to minimize deployment errors).

It also bends credulity. It suggests 7 of 10 developers work for companies (or know someone who has) that fail to prevent onslaughts of their developers from leaving over deployment problems.

That seems pretty realistic. Do 7 in 10 of us know employers with headache creating deployment practices? Probably.

The "know someone how has" clause seems like it muddies the apparent purpose of the question (to gauge how common this is). 15/15 developers on my team either are me or know someone who is me, therefore being me is extremely common? There could be a small handful of people bouncing around from company to company for this reason and a large number of people at those companies would be able to answer "yes."

60% of the time, it works every time.

The question from LaunchDarkly, btw, was as follows (asked to "500 software developers across a range of industries and job titles"):

> Have you or someone you worked with ever left a job due to pressures from over minimizing mistakes (i.e. avoiding rollbacks or failed deployments)?[0]

...Which I also would not be comfortable summarizing as "minimizing deployment errors"

[0] https://resources.launchdarkly.com/ebooks/release-assurance-...

oh that is so sneaky and that would never fly in a scientific study.

What does "over minimising mistakes" mean? I would expect that the target for 'mistakes', especially serious ones' is zero (while accepting that it may be asymptotic).

I think one they’re talking about 3 month long QA cycles for every deployment.

In any reasonable setting this would be considered priming the respondent for a particular answer and should definitely not be trusted as an unbiased response.

Not far off from handing packs of free cigarettes to medical conference attendees, having an exit poll ask them which brand of cigarettes they have in their pocket, and using the results in marketing like ”69% of doctors smoke Narcoholic brand cigarettes!”

LaunchDarkly had a major outage in the past month so maybe they are feeling the pressure.

Not a surprise. When senior devs leave an org due to mismanagement or other reasons, it creates more work for those left behind. And it's become extremely difficult to find replacement for the seniors that left.

Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues.

Also relevant:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31812864 (Ask HN: Having trouble getting senior applicants, wondering what to do about it)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006252 (Ask HN: Where are all the senior front end engineers?)

People really don't talk about landslide risk enough. A project with a high tech debt or operations burden is at high risk of losing enough people to zero out the project. Lose one or two people at the same time and suddenly the rest of the team is in an untenable situation. Maybe they were thinking casually about leaving before, but now that their burden has increased by 30% its more serious. Then you just keep losing people until the project fails. Can be basically impossible to restaff the project.

Indeed, I've seen two instances of this. First, early in my career, a company was acquired and had a layoff leaving a skeleton crew in IT and development. People remaining did not have the knowledge or experience to deploy or maintain the applications. That company had a week of down time where business just halted. No purchases were made, nothing previously purchased shipped, no calls to customer service were answered.

The second time was when I was an engineering manager and 3/4 of our team quit for high pay within 6 months. Our application was a line of business app with a few thousand users. Our release dates went from being delayed a few months to over a year. The companies reputation was horrid, and hiring was impossible. My boss, a Director, sent me support people who could spell "java" and expected me train them from zero. I left that disaster soon after.

So yes, the risk is real, and the result can be calamitous.

I don't think that's unavoidable, but businesses typically fail to correctly reassess the value of those employees.

If the business responded appropriately, I think people could be convinced to stay.

E.g. if they offered:

1: An instant promotion with raise for anyone not at the max level for an IC, to acknowledge that they are now the most knowledgeable people on that product.

2: Double pay until those slots are filled and newbies are trained.

3: A contract saying they get a month of PTO when the slots are filled and newbies trained.

4: Assurances that they are offering above-market rates to get the slots filled quickly (which should still be lower than the new rates for people who stayed).

What usually gets offered is pittances. A 10% raise to work 30% more hours. Maybe some flex time. It doesn't make sense for workers to stay, they can usually get better benefits and lower working hours by leaving anyways. Businesses need to offer substantially more than employees can get elsewhere.

Especially when they are going to have to spend that much to get new hires in anyway, who still have to get caught up to speed, it seems like this would make a lot of sense.

But I can understand how it is difficult for a business leader to convince himself that this jump in cost is, in fact, required. Maybe the person will just stick around? (And indeed, they do fairly often.)

I worked at a place where we had an open dev/support slot for multiple months to cope with increased load due to our success. In the meantime we all just did more support and less dev. My suggestion to management that the existing team split the salary of the open rec until it was filled (since we were doing the work anyway) was met with just short of outright laughter.

> What usually gets offered is pittances. A 10% raise to work 30% more hours.

At least in my instance, I've never seen the 10% raise, just the 30% more hours bit.

I have confessed this before and it’s appropriate to confess it again here: I have worked places where there was an onerous task that three of us split. When one of those quits, I’m looking to leave too. Not only does being the last one take away any illusions of autonomy you might have had, but it also makes you feel guilty for leaving because you know that some things won’t get done at all.

My body metabolizes guilt readily, by converting it into resentment. “I have to be here and I hate you for it.” Is not a room anyone should walk into if there’s another doorway.

> Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues.

Which makes sense. Everyone learns that the best way to get jobs is skip the recruitment pipeline by using your network.

The recruitment pipeline is so miserable at most companies, why would you put yourself through it unless it is absolutely your dream job? Even then it's probably unnecessarily stressful and time consuming and annoying. Way better to make contacts with people where you want to work and just skip it.

>Everyone learns that the best way to get jobs is skip the recruitment pipeline by using your network.

>Way better to make contacts with people where you want to work and just skip it.

Thing is, this process has to be a net positive or it's just unsustainable. Seems to me more and more that networking is just nepotism and doesn't give the best candidates the jobs they are looking for. Add in some title inflation and you've got a hell of a bubble.

> this process has to be a net positive or it's just unsustainable

Or it has to achieve the bare minimum: filling positions with anyone who makes it through the sieve.

>Senior devs are nowhere to be found through regular applicant pipelines. They seem to be leaving as a result of reaching out to friends/former colleagues.

Anecdotal, and I wouldn't call myself senior dev (though, with 10 years in industry, I'm not a junior any more), but apart from my actual first job, I've never "applied" anywhere that I haven't already been offered a position, and I know that's true for everyone I've hired/recruited. The need for engineers/developers with hands on skillsets who have actually delivered something is ridiculous, and I'm not even in the Bay area. Hell, the last time I had a technical interview it was in a pool at DEFCON, and that was only so the company could tell their board that they'd had a "rigorous and competitive interview process" (their founders words).

It's to the point where I'm a little cautious about how I talk about work outside of it, because if someone thinks you're unhappy, they'll set up a lunch in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I'm currently a junior who's senior left about 6-7 months ago. Their absence has been very heavily noticed, and the company has been unable to hire someone with even half of his knowledge/experience base.

Exactly this. Every time an org loses a senior dev not only with lots of valuable skill and proven productivity and knowledge about how the company works etc it should be affected in the stock price if the place is publicly traded. That’s how much I think it hurts. The replacement cost to bring up other team members or to skill up and train juniors takes a lot of time and energy and money.

Now if this dev left because he or she was an asshole and everyone hated working with them then it could be a net net positive or even if on the whole is negligible then that’s a win in terms of team morale and productivity.

> creating a crisis for recruiters

Weird angle. Isn't the actual story the high levels of burnout in developers, rather than the inconvenience this creates for recruiters? The article is more balanced, but why lead with this?

"Won't someone please think of the recruiters!"

I know a few recruiters who made close to $1 million in fees in the past few years. I dont feel sorry for most of them

Probably not a great representation for the whole field in general.

Recruiters are just barely part of the managerial class so they are more easily emphasized with by others in that class.

Reminds me of; ‘Loads of men are killed in war, women most affected’

Or more commonly: Stocks decline today on news of unemployment. I sure feel sad for those stocks.

Or "no damage to car after cyclist killed in traffic accident"

LOL

Actually, when a company announces layoffs, its stock tends to rise (unless it's in such a bad shape that even major "cost cutting" can't make the punters more optimistic).

I cringe every time I hear people celebrate the price of housing going up. Due to financialization we have an economy predicated on the necessities of life becoming increasingly expensive. I fantasize about the opposite; ubiquitous low cost quality housing available to even the most destitute. Sometimes I feel we're in Idiocracy and we're watering plants with Brawndo and wondering why the crops are dying.

I have never heard of worklife.news before, but it seems to be a site more targeted at managers, recruiters, HR folks, and the like. Not surprising or even necessarily bad that they would frame a headline to highlight the story's connection to its audience.

I mean, if this were real, and this actually created a 'crisis' for recruiters, then this would be a great thing for them. Given that hiring is slowing down, and all.

Well; a both cynical and charitable take: We the techies do fun techie things in the service of business. As such, developer burnout is a proxy impact, and inability of business to advance business goals is a final impact :-/.

(Basically, daily I'm training my ops managers team that when they update directors/executives, impact is not "Process XYZ inadvertently set up flag ABC on table QEW due to lockwait timeout", but "300 employees had their union dues incorrectly deducted" )

I was thinking the very same thing. I like how they diverted the problem away from the real issue to benefit them - sarcasm.

It points to developer apathy. I sometimes wonder if that's just the global feeling at the moment. Everyone that's working on widget X suddenly doesn't care because of all the crises going on. Rampant inflation, extreme inequality. By continuing to work on widget x they are just supporting more of the same. Think people want society to change a bit before moving forward with being happy.

I like to think IT is mostly inhabited by really smart ppl.

One thing really smart ppl have in common is that they see the world as it is. They are aware of thr glaring issues incompetence has brought upon this world.

And that causes depression. Looking at the future there is literally nothing to be happy about.

Ppl are slowly preparing for civil wars, power outages, food shortage and worse.

And those are ppl you would often consider pretty layed back about life in general.

>One thing really smart ppl have in common is that they see the world as it is.

This is completely false. Isaac Newton spent more time studying alchemy and biblical prophecy than he did on mathematics and physics.

One could argue that at the time those weren’t as far removed as they are now.

Newton mostly figured out how things work, not necessarily why.

Are you saying alchemy and spirituality is not as important as science? If that's the case, good luck with that view. Understanding and contemplating on both creates a Wisdom. Intelligence can only take you so far, the world is way bigger than science could ever be capable of containing.

It was quite clear what I was saying; the study of science is better at improving our ability to see the world "as it is" than things like alchemy or prophecy, and yet Newton pursued the latter two things much more, despite being a brilliant person. In other words, there is considerable evidence that he did not see the world "as it is".

>Understanding and contemplating on both creates a Wisdom. Intelligence can only take you so far, the world is way bigger than science could ever be capable of containing.

If you believe that, say, trying to create gold by mixing crushed rubies with distilled water while Saturn is in the seventh house of the moon demonstrates that someone sees the world "as it is", then the onus is entirely on you to show that. In the meantime, I have no problem declaring you wrong. Moreover, the above comment is full of platitudes that aren't really relevant to the discussion of whether or not very smart people see the world "as it is". I'd rather not digress any further, so I won't reply again.

> One thing really smart ppl have in common is that they see the world as it is.

I wish that were true. Some use they power against themselves, making better delusions instead.

This is just intrinsic to how businesses are run.

Businesses are run by decision makers. Decision makers delegate tasks to do-ers. If do-ers mess up, it is solely their fault for underdelivering (in the eyes of the delegator/decision-maker).

The idea that do-ers can make decisions or inversely - that decision makers can do (anything beside delegate) is alien in business.

And if decision makers mess up, it is solely the decision makers fault for making a bad decision. Of course, holding decision makers accountable for their error never happens in real life, so the do-ers go elsewhere.

I don't understand why this is so hard for people to grasp.

> The idea that do-ers can make decisions or inversely - that decision makers can do (anything beside delegate) is alien in business.

No. Knowledge workers are never mere executors, by definition.

Additionally, not all business exists to benefit only the "decision makers". There are such things as coops, social utility companies and no profits.

We generally are talking capitalists when discussing such things, and those other people you list are “socialists”.

This sounds a lot like the Marxist theory of alienation [0] in practice.

Because do-ers can't decide what they do, they get alienated from their work product and get apathetic.

The fact that it is happening during a capitalist crisis only adds strength to the theory.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

Adjacent thread in a different market, currently at the top of r/medicine: "Is it just me... Or do things feel off?"

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/w9ufnt/is_it_just...

Man, that thread is sobering. I knew things were bad, but to see a whole thread of people agreeing that things are worse than ever does not make me hopeful.

The thread scares me, as it confirms some of my own feelings for the past year or so. To see it written down by strangers is just.. eerie

> Rampant inflation, extreme inequality

[I'll add climate change to that.]

It's well known that burnout is often caused by work goals being misaligned with personal goal.

Obviously millions of people don't feel like the purpose of their life is to make some billionaire more wealthy.

People feel burned out by working on SEO instead of things important for the future of humanity.

Good insight. Thanks for the different take on this situation. After thinking about this, I tend to agree. This could be happening in the background, unconsciously, without anyone noticing. Maybe this will be the on of the catalyst's for change.

Thank you for succinctly articulating what I was trying to say long-form.

I wallow in the negative as a result of decades of troubleshooting and negative reinforcement loops making me risk-averse. I'm over 50% confident that I will find a fatal flaw within seconds of using any tech for the first time. This is the lens through which I see the entire tech community and all of its failings. Loosely, the tech community appears to be racing towards empire, while I've always felt a kinship with rebels.

So, here are 10 off-the-cuff alternative future achievements that I thought were going to happen after the internet arrived in the mid-90s. I believe that our suffering today is due to living in this bizarro future that we got caught up in instead:

1. Developers get connected with real capital on the order of a year's income to get "real work done" outside of the mainstream venture capital and corporate structure.

2. Developers are able to spend their time automating processes instead of having to do the same thing by hand over and over again.

3. Developers live on a modest income under $100,000 in 2022 dollars, requiring less than a 10 hour weekly commitment to meet basic expenses, with the rest of their time going towards getting real work done.

4. Developers have the time to automate such things as solar power, hydroponic robotic gardens, electric transportation, hempcrete buildings, etc so they can put in short one-time risks for a lifetime of reward.

5. Developers are taught how to set boundaries and communicate from the beginning, to prevent getting stretched too thin and burning out after putting in tremendous effort for months/years of their lives thanklessly.

6. Developers have the time to have hobbies outside of video games, to write a blog or travel or exercise or take care of their health or do any number of positive things instead of dying prematurely of preventably illnesses.

7. Developers live in a society where people are informed and educated so that they don't have to spend nearly the entirety of their time performing basic troubleshooting for people who are technologically illiterate.

8. Developers are free of the infinite liability of obligation after helping someone troubleshoot something or working somewhere that was their meal ticket at some point in the past.

9. Developers have a life outside of work, free from artifical deadlines and the expectation that they will perform tasks in a timely manner that were assigned by people who can't do them.

10. Developers have the personal freedom to write languages and frameworks they feel born to make, instead of facing a lifetime of putting up with the lacklusters tools which hold them back.

I could go on literally forever so I'll stop there. The thought of signing on for yet another 40 hour job that steals the entirety of my time and motivation makes me feel sick. I hesitate to say these things, because it's like speaking with a therapist. Some things are so negative that they're unthinkinkable, unsayable, as the very act of uttering them can shatter illusions and dissuade a young person from working towards their goals.

My goal here is not to be negative, but to find a way to get back to the positive vibes of the late 90s, before the Dot Bomb and 9/11, when the future was so bright that we had to wear shades. This 20 years of dogmatic idiology and wealth inequality and all of the other unenlightened greed and ego-driven kool-aid drinking is unsustainable and has got to end. We can choose a future of windowless warehouses filled with human drones, or one with self-actualization where machines do the work and we all reap the benefits with dignity as human beings.

If none of this applies to you, good for you! Go pay it forward and liberate one of the countless millions of people trapped in the rat race who are so tired of it all that it takes everything they have just to make it through each day.

After meditating on my rant here yesterday, I had a couple more insights:

* Human beings evolved as hunter-gatherers working 2 hours per day to meet their basic needs, or about 1-2 days per week. We're designed to work hard in short bursts and save for lean times, not every single day in overcrowded communities just to scrape by. Until modern tech (and civilization itself) can provide that level of affluence for everyone on the planet through automation, it's self-evidently a bill of goods.

* To accomplish this, "People" should be substituted for "Developers" in the list above, and resources to achieve self-actualization should replace the tech-related subject matter.

I think it's more complex than just "burned out".

If Shopify had laid me off on Tuesday (as it did to a few great people I worked with) I'd have been given 16 weeks severance. I doubt I would have looked for a new job for at least 6 months. Maybe a year. Maybe longer.

I've been paid so well over the last decade in this industry that I don't have debts anymore (car, home, credit cards). I don't spend much or live extravagantly. I have a safety net of money. And I have a 5-month old daughter that I want to spend more time with.

I'm not burned out, but I also don't really need to work right now. I could get by a long time just playing with my kid without needing to write a line of code. Maybe I could even downsize, move out of the city, go live somewhere with a lower cost of living and a quieter lifestyle. If I ran out of money, I could get a remote developer job in a week or two, even if it didn't pay as much as I make today.

I don't think I'm unique in this feeling. Developers are free in ways so few others are.

Six years ago I took about eight months off. Didn’t get as much done as I’d hoped by half, but I’m almost at the point I could do that again. But at some point I should be hinting if early retirement instead, so I probably won’t.

Live below your means folks. Especially if you think your ethics actually matter to you, instead of something you do for theater.

Its just the grind. Show up everyday, do the same thing, build Widget X or Widget Y. Sit in meetings to discuss mundane points. Sit there on mute while people argue and are openly rude to each other. Do it for 2 years and then get a new job to move up the ladder and get a higher salary. Remote makes it even worse as you have zero real work relationships. Meet with your director once a week to discuss progress with his little black zoom box with his name on it in white font.

Every day... For decades...

At the end what have built? What can I show my kids? There is no bridge the I made with my hands, no building, nothing permanent. Whatever I made has been cast aside in the next redesign.

Not only is there burn-out on the job, but could there also be interviewing burn-out?

In the software industry, you're doing yourself a disservice by staying at a company for more than 3 years. Even 2 years is pushing it, that is unless you are seeing wage increases that match or exceed inflation. And even if you haven't reached that amount of time, it's smart to start applying and interviewing earlier so you can have a better pick by the time you're ready to get out. I know some on HN will deny this, but I've seen enough resumes and LinkedIn profiles that demonstrate otherwise.

Hence, many of us are in a sort of medium-frequency cycle of interviewing. Applying for jobs becomes a job in and of itself, and as someone going through that process right now, I think the process has gotten much worse.

Not only are you likely to go through 3 to 4 rounds of interviews for a given employer, but now you've got to do take-home assignments. Most of the time, the estimated duration they provide is an understatement, especially if you actually want to show your best work. I've had 3 so far that wanted me to do a take-home assignment that they said could take several hours and even days. I refuse to do any that are estimated to be longer than 2 hours at this point. The other person is likely an introvert and sucks at interviewing, which can ruin your chances if they perceive the interview as not having gone well. In either case, you probably won't be hired at that place anyway.

Now multiply that experience by around 30% of the applications you've sent out. To have enough options on the table, you've got to send out at least 40+ applications (unless you've got a connection at a company already). Not only are you having to fight off all those other applicants, but you're spending a lot of your free time doing so.

Let's not forget the hours you'll also now have to spend hammering through Leetcode so you don't look like a complete fool in front of unrealistic problems you wouldn't be expected to complete in under an hour in real life.

Who actually doesn't dread facing this every few years?

I want to work in my field, but part of me also feels like saying "screw this" in favor of living in a van down by the river. Having experience might land you a better salary, but when you switch companies it's like being a junior developer all over again. I can only imagine how much it sucks for someone who has a family and kids.

I have a family and kid and hobbies and an already-demanding (time-wise) job and can absolutely say that the current high-friction hazing ritual style of tech interviewing dissuades me from looking around, even though I know I could make more by going through Thunderdome again. Even with recruiters reaching out and starting the process, interviewing is a grueling “second full-time job”.

It’s not that the interviews themselves are so terrible. I’m just a bit tired of random people saying I’m not a good fit because I couldn’t answer a specific question to their satisfaction.

I’ve been a valuable member of the team at my current company, and have received a mix of raises and promotions. I’m inclined to believe I’d do equally well elsewhere, but I first have to prove in a few hours what the past few years apparently couldn’t…

Yeah, the nitpicky rejection cycles starts to feel like an industry wide mixture of gaslighting and almost intentional impostor syndrome creation tools. All the statistics of people in FAANG/GAFAM roles that feel stuck in them because they are certain they'd not pass the interview cycle again if they left. All the statistics of "dark matter" developers that are continually harassed by FAANG/GAFAM recruiters to interview but then continually ghosted without feedback following the interviews.

Lots of mentions of how much it resembles hazing rituals, and that also seems to be the intent of many hazing rituals: gaslight about the relative strengths of "the in group" and build survivorship bias among those that make it into "the in group" and survive the hazing rituals.

I went through this recently and by the time we reached the last stages of the process I've lost interest.

I realized I literally need to be unemployed to bother going through all of these useless stages.

Things I realized: The pay that is in the ad is always lower. That recruitor who won't go away just wants you part of a funnel they get paid for, if the company really wanted you they would just make an offer. Ghosting after sending a long take home tests is more common than ghosting after a regular interview.

Ghosting after a take home test really bites. Either provide feedback or give an expectation on how long it will take to make a decision. Don't make me do free work and leave me hanging.

But yeah, it does happen. I used to advocate for take home assignments, but now I really don't know what the answer is for directly assessing skill. Leetcode sucks, but take home assignments have their own problems. Maybe the problem with both approaches is that there really is no sort of standardization of practices or measurement of success that I'm aware of.

Lawyers take a Bar exam until they pass it and then never have to take it again. They just have to stay up-to-date/active with the associated Bar (so many hours of training a year; etc).

Real Engineers take a Fundamentals of Engineering exam followed by the Professional Engineering exam in their discipline/focus. Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; paying dues; etc).

In the Software industry we love using the title "Engineer", but we don't seem to want to put the work in to make it an actual engineering profession. There is a software PE exam and professional society in existence already (ACM) built and willing to be the professional society for software engineering. I would take the Software PE exam and pay my ACM member dues in a heartbeat if that meant never needing to do another leetcode or take home assignment or whiteboard exercise in an interview cycle. We have the tools to solve this, just not the will to solve it, it seems.

I would pay $1000 to take one test so that I don't have to do another one for at least a decade. There's some real money to be made in selling the idea of accreditation to employers.

Bar exam and MCAT exam prep industries do seem to make good money in some states some years. An appeal to capitalism isn't the worst idea for how to sell the idea to employers.

(ETA: Though arguably it is exactly how we got multiple companies like leetcode that are building the worst of both worlds, the standardized testing and extremely spotty employer buy-in across a handful of non-federated competitors.)

Leetcode is just based on the wrong premise. No one has to be a good developer or engineer to do leetcode. Even the people who run Leetcode don't need to be good engineers. Hosting a bunch of reductive code puzzles is a lot easier than creating structured exams and proctoring them. This isn't to say that the latter isn't feasible, but the incentive is there to fool the industry into thinking that the ability to solve puzzles is a good metric for technical skills.

> Then Engineers have to stay with the associated Professional Society (so many hours of training a year; paying dues; etc).

Speaking for the US, they do not. Joining a professional society is not a condition of licensure, nor is licensure required to join (I have been a member if IEEE since I joined in undergrad in 2001 and never even took the FE).

Continuing education requirements are set by the state you are licensed in. Texas (where I would have been if I had pursued licensure) requires a mere 15 Professional Development Hours per year, of which five may be self-directed. That is far, far below what our industry expects.

Also, I worked for four years as an electrical engineer without even being an EIT. Not all "real Engineers" require licenses.

> There is a software PE exam

Not anymore. Every state that once offered it has dropped it, and NCEES no longer maintains such a test.

> if that meant never needing to do another leetcode or take home assignment or whiteboard exercise in an interview cycle

Considering how low the requirements for maintaining a PE are after passing the initial exams, I don't think that has a snowball's chance in Hell of flying in this industry.

> I used to advocate for take home assignments, but now I really don't know what the answer is for directly assessing skill.

The way we do it is a one hour conversation with screensharing where they have an IDE open and complete a small test. They know we're serious as we're spending our time as well. An hour is still an hour, but more reasonable than a weekend-long take-home test.

I spent 8 hours on a Saturday the other weekend on a take home assignment and then spent most of Sunday regretting it and angry with myself that I'd let that eat into my weekend so much. The least companies could do is compensate this useless labor.

Interviewing also has been putting me into a spot where I'm starting to wonder if changing professions entirely may be less work.

I wish this profession would grow up. The hazing requirements of every interview cycle are so childish and immature and so perpetually stuck in "college bro culture". If we want a test before jobs, let's make it a standardized test you only need to take once in your career like a real profession would have. So many interviewers would appreciate the principal of DRY and yet as an industry we can't abstract away this menial repetitivity that other industries solved centuries ago?

> The least companies could do is compensate this useless labor.

I've found having the company present when you do the test, i.e. screensharing or whatever, is a good compromise. You can talk about the problem, and you know they've got some (time) skin in the game.

The tests become shorter when this is the case, e.g. 1 hour rather than 8 hours. Because they don't want to spend 8 hours sitting there while you do the test.

They're not going to invite 100 candidates to do that test if they only have one position open, but if they send out the test and you complete it on your own time they might.

That's just it, it's a power imbalance that favors the company and not the interviewee.

Most cases when I've requested accommodations or told interviewers that I don't have time for their take home tests, I've gotten back: "Well, start over again in a year or so when you do think you have time. Let us know when that is, kthxbye."

Even from companies "desperate" to fill roles according to recruiters.

Many of those roles I'm fine with that too, if they want to waste my time on a lengthy take home assignment and a bunch of free labor that truly benefits neither of us, maybe it isn't the right role for me. Many of those roles I do the free labor anyway and regret it and it negatively influences any interest I have in further next steps and/or my entire opinion of the company. (I will absolutely shit talk the companies that have most wasted my time in interview processes.)

There's not a lot I can do about that power imbalance other than point to the fact that it is deeply systemic and wish that we'd mature the industry to better systems.

> You can talk about the problem, and you know they've got some (time) skin in the game.

Perhaps it's better than being ghosted on a take home assignment, but am I the only one who thinks this is crap as well?

It sounds great on paper, for sure. But in my experience, talking about a problem ends up being like talking to a tree trunk. They say "we want to see how you'd work with us", but when I try and engage the interviewer (without asking them for the answers, obviously), I almost always get blank stares and it's super awkward. Even if I just speak out loud as I'm reasoning things, it's still weird as hell.

Yes, it could work if the interviewer was skilled at playing the role of a collaborator, but almost none of them are. Don't tell me to do a task as if doing teamwork on the job without even faking the teamwork part.

To your point, think the advantage is that they can't ghost you or overwork you that way.

I am overemployed. That is, I work three full time remote jobs.

At all three orgs, there are developers rapidly burning out and the biggest problem is that despite major organizational crises, ranging from mass layoffs to mass turnover and the inability to fill half the seats on any given team (especially with team leads and senior talent) to enormous projects that have crept up in scope from 8 people to 60, there has been no acknowledgement by management that anything is even wrong.

At the company with layoffs, we are still working on product roadmaps from before, but now entire teams responsible for certain product dependencies are gone.

At the company that cannot fill half the seats, there are no truly senior devs and only two juniors and one intermediate/senior (me and I am not willing to fill a senior role). Our skip manager literally said "assume we have a senior dev or team lead for planning." They have not been able to hire one for 6 months now.

At the company with the project exploding in scope, it can take several weeks to get a meeting with key people as there are just so many wires crossing.

Not even a "we understand that X is not working" from management. Just them repeating goals and deadlines in all orgs.

> A report from software platform LaunchDarkly revealed that nearly 7 in 10 developers (67%) have left a job due to pressure around minimizing deployment errors or know someone who has.

[emphasis mine]

Without knowing more about the connectedness of software-developer relationships, I have no idea how widespread the problem is.

That sentence could've been re-written to the equivalent:

> Launchdarkly wants you to remember that they have a product that intends to help with deployment errors

The rest is window dressing.

"A report from Obscure Gray Corporation demonstrated that more than 8 in 10 people had no idea who they are."

> pressure around minimizing deployment errors

... while not being given any tools or time or support to do so ...

I don't get it. I have a stellar resume and a proven track record in the public domain (open source but I've been struggling to find work and have accepted short term work for half my normal rate. There are so few opportunities, I had to switch to teaching people how to code.

The market is still red hot, not sure what you're doing wrong.

This goes against the feeling I have of the market (nonstop recruiters). At which point in time did you feel the market had more opportunities? 2020? 2017?

I get seemingly endless messages from recruiters too but I don't think that's a very useful metric for the state of the market. Probably 1/3 of the roles they send to me don't look anything like my profile at all. At least another 1/3 match technically but are offering nowhere near what I already make. Of the final 1/3 or less that aren't immediately ruled out I am probably interested enough to respond to maybe half and at least 80% of those turn out to be snake oil one way or another. So maybe 3% of the recruiter emails I receive might actually be a real opportunity that I'd consider exploring. And that's before even speaking with a potential employer/client to see what the role really is and whether we're any kind of fit at all culturally.

Maybe it's due to syntax errors?

Haha good one! Unfortunately the edit button on HN disappears after some time. Missing brackets are among the easiest issues to find while coding.

If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market, you're doing something horribly wrong. I'm willing to bet $100 that your resume is not stellar.

Many people are bad at evaluating themselves. I've seen countless posts by juniors apparently "grinding hard" to get a job, and you just take 1 look at their resume and everything makes sense. Zero research on how to write resumes, zero prep, projects are garbage, shotgunning on indeed without some creativity etc.

The market is pretty rough now. Layoffs are flooding the market, pay is not going up and companies happy to interview are scared to hire.

Layoffs hit overvalued, bloated companies, and the majority of laid of people are non-technical staff, or junior employees.

None of this has ANY effect on competent software engineers. Most of my peers keep getting massive offers left and right. Nothing has changed for them.

> Most of my peers

This is the job market equivalent of "it works on my computer."

Do you have hard data examples like peer A got 100,000 in New York for Python developer?

Shopify laying off 10% of their workforce could have an effect with Ruby developers.

None of this has ANY effect on competent software engineers.

Maybe in your part of the world or the industry. I know at least a few excellent people with excellent track records and previously excellent career paths who have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time since COVID and its aftermath, just like I did in the GFC and the Dot Bomb before.

They say pride comes before the fall. I imagine that over the next couple of years some relatively young developers who have coasted along on the wave of tech growth through the 2010s and never experienced a big bust in the industry before are going to learn that those nice salaries and equity-backed top-ups aren't nearly as valuable or guaranteed as they've become used to.

> If you can't find a job with a "proven track record" in this market, you're doing something horribly wrong.

Can you define both what "horribly wrong" looks like and what "not horribly wrong" looks like? Because I can't.

The problem with a "proven track record" is that nobody believes what you write on your resume and nobody wants to bother looking at your code. That leaves hiring on "feel" and I have no idea what somebody needs to put in their cover letter and/or resume to "feel" right to a recruiter, an HR rep and a hiring manager all at the same time.

> nobody believes what you write on your resume

That's nonsense.

It's quite straightforward actually: go through the CVs of engineers working at top companies and look how their resume looks different from yours.

Chances are that they're actually selling themselves properly, using lots of jargon, using strong action verbs, and following the advice that has shown to work for the last decade.

Can I see your resume? :) I'm not trying to put you on the spot and I'll understand if you don't want to share. I'm just curious.

If you're feeling generous, you can email it to me at soft.desk0874@fastmail.com. If not, no hard feelings.

I started coding at 14 years old and have 10+ years of software development experience in a range of companies; both startups and corporations in a range of industries. I have 10 years of experience with open source. One of my projects has almost 6K stars on GitHub and almost 100K downloads per week. I even worked for a Y Combinator-backed company for over a year which had tons of big name SV investors including the famous actor Ashton Kutcher and Michael Jordan. My last job was leading the P2P team at a top blockchain company. The scalable P2P network solution which my team developed is still used 3 years after launch and never encountered any issues once launched (no vulnerabilities or bugs which needed patching). It only took 6 months for my team of 4 devs to build it from scratch. I'm willing to bet that it's among the simplest and best designed P2P libraries in the industry.

My record is impeccable. I build highly reliable software fast both as part of a group or as a solo freelancer. Much of my work is in the public domain on GitHub so it's easy to verify all this and check my code quality, automated tests and PR review history.

Well, that's an insane background, so that can't be the issue.

One question though: how many of those years 10 years have you worked in a full-time position?

I think it may depend on what your expertise is.

This seems to vary wildly depending on the market you're in.

At one end of the spectrum I have a few friends who are tech employees at senior-to-executive levels in major tech centres in the US. The way they talk it sounds like any of them could easily get five offers within a week or two all for a huge amount of money via their networks.

At the other end of the spectrum I have other friends with broadly similar experience and skill levels who do freelance or contract work here in the UK. That market has been wrecked by IR35 and Brexit on top of the same COVID problems, global economic conditions and rampant inflation as everyone else. There are fewer opportunities now. Maybe 80% of those that remain require a strange contract arrangement where you get none of the benefits of being an employee but somehow end up paying all of the overheads of both an employee and a large employer. And the regulatory change happened across the whole industry literally overnight so with the smaller market as well there doesn't seem to have been enough competition to push rates up to compensate.

Unsurprisingly several of my friends in the UK have considered going back to being permanent employees or already made the jump. But then the only way to make even decent money by US standards in the UK was to be an independent or to start your own business. So basically we have people with 10 or even 20 years of experience who might be staff/principal engineer level or senior engineering managers but whose total comp is about the same as a newbie starting their first job at a FAANG in any US tech centre.

Both groups find it hard to believe what's happening to the other but that doesn't mean either is wrong. They're effectively operating in entirely different markets with entirely different constraints.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Oh the poor recruiters! That's a group I have little sympathy for as employer and as an employee.

To be fair to the article, it real seems to be more about developer burn out, which I have sympathy for. If you have trouble attracting talent, maybe think about how you are treating your talent?

You mean those recruiters might have to spam me more with "last chance" emails?

Nurses, teachers, airline workers, hospitality employees, and now developers.

We can't all just get tired of working and quit.

Sounds like our system has become unsustainable.

> We can't all just get tired of working and quit.

Yes, we can.

Developers: “Cumbersome processes are contributing to burnout.”

Clueless VP: “It’s remote that’s at fault! If everyone were just in the same location, and we could do team-building exercises then everything would be fine!”

Not sure what the author of the article was thinking putting those two statements next to each other.

Oh no, poor recruiters.

Full disclosure - I work at LaunchDarkly (I look after our DevRel team) - but this is a topic I'm super passionate about also, so though it was worth sharing out. We talk about burnout a lot - but what I really appreciate about posts like this (and the report that it references) is that it gives some tangible examples of where that burnout comes from - and hopefully some paths to mitigating it.

Hope you find the read interesting!

I'm not burned out and would in fact love a part-time/freelance gig (I mainly do C/C++ and python but wear many hats)... however I'm completely unsatisfied with the current options for finding such work because it always seems like a race to the bottom against less skilled candidates from other countries who will always undercut your pricing and the companies never seem to care.

What do you suggest?

This is still an advertisement.

I can confirm that, anecdotally, this is a fairly accurate portrayal of the reasons for my burnout over the last couple years.

The past several years at my company have been particularly focused on “quick and dirty results” that I predict will end badly, and so far it has every time, leaving me feeling responsible despite management decisions that ignored the consequences and recommendations I laid out. It gets old.

So, shortly before the pandemic, I took initiative to work extra nights and weekends to build a working prototype of a new version of our core internal app, that would ultimately let us go faster and would transform the way we communicate and give us unprecedented flexibility with our clients.

It was passed off as “that’s nice, but let’s get {x} out the door first”. It quickly became apparent that there was, and will always be, another {x} that needs to get out the door before we do anything else.

Having more autonomy and trust that I might actually have a solid grasp on what projects will yield the biggest returns, and being able to commit my focus to those tasks, and being able to hold my managers to the same accountability that they hold me to when making decisions, all would go a long way to improving my job satisfaction AND most importantly, improving our product and our value that we provide to our clients.

>Team forming and relaying goals is much harder to do in a fully remote environment.

Anecdata: I've found this to be true in places that were primarily non-remote. But places I've worked that were full remote didn't have this issue.

So, on one side we have layoffs and freeze positions and on the other side we have this. This is odd.

This is thinly disguised advertising.

Since always

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