Can ChatGPT Save Programmers?
kolide.com
kolide.com
> A: Yes. Significantly.
I think the article misses the point. It starts by suggesting that many programmers suffer from burnout, but it builds from the hypothesis that the activity of programming itself is the cause.
I may be wrong, but in my experience, developers suffer burnout because of managerial decisions and bureaucratic stuff piled upon them. Most are happier when they just, well, are writing code.
So will ChatGPT increase the joy of programming? I don't know. But it for sure will not get rid of the annoyances mentioned.
I think you are probably right that a lot of engineering burn-out comes from things managers require engineers to do.
But I think it's also true that a lot of what managers say and do is often a lossy representation of things engineers would need to do anyway if they didn't have management.
Remove the managers and the bureaucracy and the things that make programming hard and likely prone to burn-out still exist.
That doesn't mean managers aren't contributors of their own unique frustrations, but I don't think it accounts for the high amount of burn-out in our field.
That would require an actual survey.
But I would say that inexplicable direction changes and constant out-of-order requests are major contributors to these frustrations, and those don't come from the practice of writing software.
I don't get burned out working on personal projects. They are written exactly how I want them to be, and can be worked on at a leisurely pace. They don't have scaffolding and ladders littered all over the place, which is equivalent to the output detritus of middle managers and scrum masters. They don't have some coach shouting from the top to "go faster", while they recline on a lawn chair.
Working on a project as a solo dev or in a self-organized group is like scaling a rock wall. You are free to choose how to climb the wall. You can do so without a harness. You can sit at the base and sip on lemonade. You can walk over to a different wall and stare at it for an hour, before deciding not to climb it.
This is compared to being forced to climb the rickety scaffolding and ladders put in place by "people who know better", unable to detach your harness for fear that you'll fall to your death. Even though you can clearly see a much better path to the finish line.
Is one approach theoretically safer than the other? Sure. But when you're bouldering a 20 foot wall with thick pads at the base, all that scaffolding just looks silly.