Job satisfaction crisis 📉🔥
Only 20% of professional developers are happy at work.* 47.7% are complacent. 32.1% are not happy at work.
Those numbers are sad.
The question
It got me thinking: what the hell is wrong with our industry?
The top reason for job dissatisfaction is legacy code, followed by build and deployment complexity.
We’ve all been there. If it’s valuable, it’s probably legacy.
A pain to maintain, full of hidden complexity, written by (probably me 10 years ago when I had no clue how to write good software pressured by a bullshit deadline — you’re welcome).
It’s no wonder that I keep doing this:
- join a company
- fix the dev environment
- automate deployment
And then figure out how to chop up the big ball of yarn that is legacy code so that we can actually ship a simple feature in less than 3 months.
Every. Time.
Lack of feedback
But beyond that, I think the answer is that most development jobs are soul-crushing.
You want to see that your work is *valuable, has an impact, *and, ideally, is making a positive change in the world.
But most development teams are so far removed from the actual outcome that these valuable feedback loops can’t happen.
You get tickets handed over by a manager you have zero respect for. You’re working for someone else’s bottom line—a cog in the machine. There’s never time to pay down some crushing technical debt. The only company’s mission is to make the owners fat. And they have no problem cutting xmas bonuses because you only delivered $15 million instead of the $25 million goal they pulled out of their ass.
You do great work? You get paid. You do what’s required? You get paid. You play mario kart all day long? You get paid.
Dream job, right? Wrong.
After the honeymoon phase ends, it slowly sucks the soul out of the thing you fell in love with… programming, building things, and being creative.
There is a better way
I believe that there is power in small teams with a big mission.
If we bring business and tech closer together, then as a developer, you’d actually see the impact of your work, and job satisfaction would go up.
Imagine we’d manage technical debt successfully and invest in our tools and deployment.
How much ahead a company like that would be?
How about saying no? We’ll intentionally limit ourselves to solving a specific problem that keeps the product lean instead of spreading ourselves so thin that everything crumbles.
What if we didn’t pursue growth as the only holy metric?
Alright, I know these are not actual solutions, more like demands someone would nail to the company HQ door if these were the 1500s.
But it’s still important to think about where we want to be as an industry, and each one of us can contribute to change in a small way.
P.S. What do you think of the survey?
Yours,
Taj
*According to the StackOverflow 2024 Developer Survey