Bobby
Appearances
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, I think this speaks to our technical debt metaphor and some of the argumentation we've had on this show with friends about is that a good metaphor or not? Because you can't really quantify it like you can actual debt. You can take your debt and your debt service principle and interest. You can take your interest rate.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And you can put that on a chart and you can extrapolate it and say, look, if we don't pay this debt down now, maybe not if you're the United States government, but if you're like an actual business, you can say, if we don't pay this debt down, we're going to go bankrupt in 90 days. And that convinces leadership to be like, okay, it's worth it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But when it comes to technical debt, we lack that quantitative ability to extrapolate forward and say, we're going this slow right now. If we don't dramatically change things, start paying this down. we're going to grind to a halt in 90 days.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, it's one place. Like greed also drives innovation, right? Like I want to make money. Of course. I need to invent something to make more money.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, I like that because you have experience that we don't have in trying to like craft those so that they are optimal because you only have so much time and opportunities to like pull somebody for their thoughts. And if you pull them out incorrectly on accident, then you're kind of wasting everybody's time. Let me rant for a split second here about Stack Overflow and URLs, okay?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So first of all, I appreciate you all doing the survey. No real hate here, but... I was trying to answer Adam's question, which was, do we have past year's results? So I went to this year's results, survey.stackoverflow.co slash 2024 slash professional developers, found the link to that survey question. And then I went to the URL bar and I changed the year from 2024 to 2023. 404, page not found.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, come on, people. Respect the URL structure. This is like what address bar hacking is all about. Come on. Help us get to things in a way that makes sense. I just appreciate good URLs, and that's not a good one. Anyways, that was my mini rant because I was going to have answers for you, Adam. I was going to have last year's answer to this question.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
All right, real-time follow-up. I used their user interface to find last year's results. And as far as I can tell, they did not ask this question in 2023. Maybe it was just one year they didn't, but we did not have last year's answer to this particular question. That's not why it 404'd, okay?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
They still changed their URL structure, but had it stayed the same, it still would have 404'd because they didn't ask that question. So unfortunately, we can't really go back and say, You know, which way is it trending? Or is this an anomaly or anything like that?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I would love to hear this, yes.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Okay. Whether or not I'm happy or unhappy. It's a fleeting thing, happiness. Am I satisfied in my work? Yes. Do I always think that? No. Am I a typical developer? Probably not anymore. We've been podcasters now for a long time. And so I don't hold a nine to five software job, which is probably the people mostly who are being interviewed or surveyed. I wasn't in that survey.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, I think it's a little bit better because you're directly asking the people.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I like that approach. I think that time waste is reported by the actual people wasting the time. And so it's probably relatively reliable. Of course, there's always trolls and thoughtless respondents, but you can't get around that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, I'm totally just being inefficient because of all these other things. It's not me. It's you. There's that. I mean, you can't really maybe you just account for that in your numbers. But yeah, if you are saying technical debt, complexity, bureaucracy, whatever it is, all these factors. Ultimately, for the business, are costing money, slowing things down.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So my sentiment was not in there. No, I did not take the Stack Overflow. We have Abhi Noda here with us from DX. Abhi, did you take the Stack Overflow survey?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Wasting time is really a decent measure for that, like how much time is actually being wasted. And so if you can track that against this DXIX, what's this thing called, the DX Index?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
At the same time, I don't know, it seems like a pretty decent approach. Is that bearing fruit?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right. I think you should have a, do you do an annual or semi-annual survey for, to the public? Like Stack Overflow does?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The nice thing about this particular measure or this combination of measures is that if it could be somewhat generalized and made public, it's now a tool and a resource for people who don't have those quantitative metrics inside their company to say, look, this stuff really matters. Look what it did for... Walmart and you know, these, these important companies, it's moving their bottom line.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's making them more productive and they've, they've proved it out over N years. And so if that's public information that I can take to my leadership and use that, then convince them that, Hey, let's call a feature freeze or whatever it is that I'm trying to get done. Right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Interesting results. 80% is a large number. I mean, that's an overwhelming number, and it's not a small survey. Pareto's principle says 80-20.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Or lack thereof, I guess. That would be the 20. The happy would be 20, and the unhappy would be 80-20. What's interesting about this, so this came out, as we said, from the 2024 Stack Overflow Survey results synthesized by ShiftMag.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So shout out to Anastasia Uspensky at ShiftMag for really highlighting this particular point and pulling together a few other data points to try to figure out, she was trying to figure out why, why are they synthesized? And so you might think, well, it's the AI. The AI is taking away our joy. That doesn't seem like that's the case. At least that's what her conclusion is. It's not the AI.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, when you have the opportunity to become the index, I think, I mean, obviously, you know way more about your business than I do and how important it is internally as a proprietary thing. But I can see huge upside in the open sourcing of it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
The AI is making us slightly more productive and maybe a little bit more apprehensive about the future. But currently, I think developers who are in their seats... writing code know that at least today they aren't being replaced in large swaths by AI. So if you're a good software developer today, you're not too worried about that, at least not in the present.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right. Yeah. I mean, we can get into the licensing discussions and we're happy to, we do it all the time. Yeah. And depending on what it is, open source might not even be the right thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
word right like maybe it's creative commons maybe it's right but you could still hold trademark and copyright against it like dxi could be a trademarked thing but also how you go about doing it and how others can go about doing it you can just let that stuff loose you don't let go of the copyright but you just let other people use it so and you can't call it dxi it is a product right you trademark the dxi right that's what you're saying right makes sense
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
they can be DXI compatible or, you know, whatever, but that's in the weeds. You were talking about the 14. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Sounds pretty cool. So you have found then if you have a DXI, which a lot of these companies do via deploying your guys's proprietary platform and you're tracking time waste, you found that a, there is an inverse correlation between the two that is measurable and repeatable and reliable. Yeah. That's pretty powerful.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, we all know it's true, but like actually proving that it's true is a whole different thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And do you find that it follows Pareto's principle as well in terms of effort? Like 20% of your effort gets 80% of your results? Or as you continue to improve your DX, is it trailing off or not?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
At the edges, right.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That would be worth knowing. It's even, I mean, I think it's, it's logical that that would be the case in almost any effort at a certain point you're, you're squeezing the radish, you know, but like what's the sweet spot for, for companies where they can put in this much effort into their developer experience and get that much out. Yeah. I think that would be worth knowing. Absolutely.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And it's not the stuff they're working on necessarily, but it is other things. Other things like tech debt and complexity. And so that kind of comes out in all kinds of different ways. But that was her finding. Abhi, do you have, you run a survey company, right? You guys create surveys for folks.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You could almost map softwares as a service on top of that sucker. I mean, there's like an offering for each of these. I mean, there's a whole industry around.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Production, debugging, incident response, code review, et cetera, et cetera. I just find that interesting.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Another newish feature of a lot of cloud hosts are preview branches. That's another way where you can get change confidence. Netlify, Vercel, et cetera, they're providing a place where you can have your development branch and it can be constantly publishing to a preview page. on a subdomain, on a website.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And so now you can both look at it yourself in production-ish and then also send it to your QA team or to your boss or whoever, your customer. I think that definitely helps with change confidence because... Previews. Previews are nice. But yeah, there's so many tools that overlap in these things as well.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That one rhymes, so you know it's true.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I don't mean to reduce. I don't mean to reduce.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Add one more. Add one more and you got the core four.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I don't mean to reduce, but you all help people do surveys. Yeah. Just curious your thoughts as we kick into this topic.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Oh, I like this, actually. Core 2, Core 3, maybe.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'll be right. It down. I'll just write it down. Can we dig into these a little bit? So sure. The core four speed effectiveness, quality impact. You say those are outcomes, not necessarily.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
you're not doing it correctly there's your move fast and break things right there like we're moving very fast but we are breaking not breaking things yeah so a balanced portfolio this is a nice metaphor yeah you're each for each of these you have a key metric this is something that you're going to track and then you have secondary metrics so there's some balance there as well but for speed the key metric is diffs per engineer yeah and i don't know if i might take issue with that one
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
What? Tell me more.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, certainly at an individual level, at face value, it seems contradictory, but it does make sense. Yeah. Maybe you could reword that to say like averaged across whatever.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Oh, man. So many good notes for you here. Yeah. At an individual level, certainly it's a bad measure. Well, the problem is it becomes a bad measure, right? That's Goodhart's Law. Yeah. Once everybody knows that that's what's being measured. Well, we all know how to play the game.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Same thing with, I mean, it's lines of code moved to a slightly larger batch, you know? Yeah. And so I can criticize that one. I can also criticize lines of code. I can criticize features or tickets. They can all be criticized, but then you're at a certain point. You're like, well, what can we actually do that? Everything sucks. We're going to have to pick one and go with it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And I guess if the industry is somewhat standardizing around that, then it's a decent compromise.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, even with a confidence score alongside that would be really interesting. There's still challenges with that because the amount of change does not always correlate to the amount of effort you can work an entire week on finding a bug, and then you found it, and it's a one-character change. And you're so exhausted by then that your commit message says, I fixed it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
or something you know and so like the llm just doesn't have much to work on boom you know if i guess if you can just say well it's fuzzy it's not going to be a percent it's better than merely measuring so did you come to my only guess would be like a culture of small diffs or a culture of you can't figure it out yeah why are they so much higher on that one metric you haven't figured it out yet
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
My guess is you dig into that and you find there's some sort of scheduled pull request. That's just like changing something that should be in the database, but it's not.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah, I mean, that sounds fishy right there. Like, what are the odds that they're like that close?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, I thought, okay. It all depends on how exact it is. You know, if you have a vote... and you have 99 to one, you're like, okay, but if you have a vote and it's a hundred to zero, now you're like, there was some collusion here. Like something happened.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Which is fair because maybe they don't, they don't know. And so they're going to look at it. I'm just saying, if it was like exactly the same, then I'd be like, there's something wrong with our system here.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I think you got someone in that org who just doesn't go to work and they just have a bot that uses their own SSH key and just does, you know, every day merges and stuff. And then you ask that person how much they merged and they went and looked at their bot and they just guessed the right answer.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right. I always go bigger when I see something like a industry like software development and I start thinking, and we don't have answers necessarily, but I start wondering like, well, how many of workers are happy? You know, just in general, like is 80% like ridiculously large. It is an absolute terms, right? It's four out of five. That's a large percentage.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You can't be a self-reported 10x dev.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Oh, what an interesting problem, though.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But if we compared it to some other industry, right. You know, medical workers, teachers, plumbers, pick your industry. Would they be at like maybe 75% or 85% or are they down there in the 40s and 50s? And we're way out of line. That's the question that I usually ask and I don't have the answer ever. So I kind of just twiddle my thumbs and move on.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Like 1 through 10, just rate it?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
It's the words, not like a one through five thing.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Or perceived rate of pain. Have you ever seen that?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
There's a great Brian Reagan stand-up where he talks about them asking him that question when he goes into the ER, you know, and him thinking through like, what number should he say in order to get help as fast as possible? He's like, never pick seven. You know, like you're always an eight.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And so it's very much Goodhart's Law in a much funnier context.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, there's another interesting data point on their survey, another interesting question, which is about coding outside of work. And if you want an indication of somebody doing something because it makes them happy, it's something that they would do outside of work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And so the same exact work of developing, while there's 80% unhappy at work, 68% of respondents said that they write code outside of work as a hobby. That's like almost 70 out of 100 people. That's a large number. And 40%, which there's some overlap there, these aren't mutually exclusive, code outside of work for professional development or self-paced learning from online courses.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So these are people investing in themselves, caring about getting better at what they do. And that's kind of amazing. So we have this dichotomy of people who love to write software, generally speaking, and yet unhappy writing software inside of their organization. And obviously you can look at your DXi and follow the 14, but the closer you can make...
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. It's a relatively stable industry. I mean, you're always going to have people with plumbing, new plumbing, plumbing problems, et cetera. So it's not as much affected by perhaps the Federal Reserve like we are. The medical industry went through a huge swell, of course, during COVID, where there was just so many needs for medical workers that their salaries went through the roof.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
your engineering teams feel like they're doing their hobby. Think about how a hobby works. It is self-directed, first of all. So autonomy is huge. Most likely, unless they have a bunch of kids running around, there's deep work involved. You can lose yourself in it.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You can go into the, I was going to say the garage, but if we're coding, well, maybe the garage, wherever it is that you write software.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
and just pound away at it for four hours without any interruptions and really lose yourself in it a lot of these 14 metrics actually are manifest in hobbies and so if you can obviously a business is a business and so you can't just be like everybody do what they want it worked for a little while for github until they got to about 100 i think 100 engineers i was there for i was there for the ride not at github but here podcasting and paying attention and using it as a product
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And going to conferences where Zach Holman was traveling around and talking about their engineering-led development and everybody pretty much just works on what they want to, that worked for GitHub for a long time. Long meaning in years, not in employee count, like up to 100. It's not a large engineering team. They're way larger now.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
But at a certain point, that thing falls apart because there are... There's work that needs to be done that nobody would just naturally pick unless it was assigned to them and they're paid to do it. And so eventually that does. But if you can make your engineering team feel at least approximate like they would be doing this as a hobby, then I think you're going to have a lot of happy programmers.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And a lot more happiness, too. Everybody wins there. There's no losers. These drivers, these 14 drivers, have you ever done a survey where you've asked developers to rank order?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Those drivers, they do.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Do you find that to be pretty subjective or are there certain ones that always float up to the top?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. Is that across engineering teams or product teams or is that like dev systems versus or ops versus devs?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
They were in huge demand. Of course, they worked ridiculously long and
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Wait on code review. That's right. Then there's deep work. That's just meetings, right? Just like, hey.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
trying hours and so that was probably not producing happiness but the pay was really really good and now coming down on the other side of it it's similar to the software world where it's like demand is waning jobs are harder to find you may go unemployed for a while and so there's probably a similar chart if you were to chart overall demand
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
What matters most to your teams?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So you're sitting pretty.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So you got some, there's some room for improvement here.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, we all want to think that we're doing well in that which we set out to do well. But... The worst place to be is to not be doing well and not know it, right? So at this point, of course, you are reassured because overall you're doing quite well. But even if you weren't, at least then you would know, okay, I thought I was doing well, but I obviously have some things to fix.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Now, if we picked one of those three, let's not do commit change size or whatever that one is. Let's go to the other two and say, okay, these are room for improvement. So pick one of those two and just spitballing, like what could you, Abinoda, as a leader do, right? to today, tomorrow, in order to like meaningfully move that at your next snapshot. Do you have any ideas?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Teachers, though, is a good one to cross-examine on that. Teachers are never happy, are they? I mean, they're so under-resourced. They're struggling. I just feel like most teachers probably would love to be happier.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
And how do you focus on that? Like, what are your actual tactics?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I'm not sure where you scored on speed, but I assume it's pretty well considering these were the only three that weren't great. Have you ever considered compromising a little bit of speed? Like there's your trade-off is like, let's slow down a little bit. Because a lot of times just time to breathe and refactor and maintain actually improves code maintainability.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
If you have maybe your snow leopard moment, for instance, I'm not saying do a feature freeze or anything, but like small bits.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Uh-oh, this is a real-time demo.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
He knows the inside story.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Well, I mean, just roughly. I'm not trying to drill down. My point is like smaller teams like these generalized aggregated numbers. You can see like, oh, well, there's a skew there because of this one person situation or whatever it is.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So you're feeling better.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. We'll give you a overall score, the changelog score for your business.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Would you be like GitHub insofar as they took a $7.5 billion payout? I would take that. I would take that.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Yeah. I think it does. This particular question was specific to like, are you happy with your job? And so that is the context that we're talking about. But of course, nobody just draws a wall up around their job. And like, as they walk through the door to work, all of a sudden they're like this different feeling person. These things do affect each other.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
definitely for a certain demographic RTO no right I do think that that's my new tagline Jared not rug pull not cool it's RTO no it's a good one I was gonna say I just was gonna say I do think that like freedom to live your life in a way that suits you and still work is a huge driver for a lot of people more more than money probably right up there with like productivity and enjoyment of my work is like do I also get to live my life in a way that suits me
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
but that's maybe just me projecting because it's always been my primary driver even more so than money is freedom and I've very much enjoyed it for many years so I'm appreciative that I have it so maybe I over emphasize that but I'm sure there's a survey out there that answers that somewhere the stack overflow or next year's DX what are you guys going to call this thing your public thing probably state of state of DX DX or developer productivity we kind of use those terms interchangeably right
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Careful now, because there is a state of organization run by a friend of ours who does state of JS, state of HTML, state of CSS. And they have this whole platform called state of. Yeah.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You could also team up with them and have them help you run it or something, and then I'm sure they'd be happy to, because they did create, although you have all your own software, so maybe it would be a square peg, a round hole. But I know they have opened it up, and Google runs the state of HTML survey with them.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
So if you wanted to really use state of, I think there's definitely opportunity there. Anyways, in the weeds again. Let's call it a show. What do you think, Adam? Yeah, I'm down. Obby, thanks, man.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
They said, meh. So what this number is, is you take the happy people, and it's 20%. And then there's two categories that make up the 80%. And a large part of that is not like, I hate my job. They're just like, you know, it's a job, which isn't all that bad. I mean, a job is a job because it's work.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
I mean, it's not, I know we have a culture and of course the desire to like follow your passion and do what you love and all of these things. But that's the few and the proud usually who can actually do that. You know, it's not very many of us.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
That's how I read it as well. Yes. Technical debt and complexity are the two driving factors to this unhappiness, which effectively is developer experience. I mean, it's your work. And how did we get there? I think it's just like two decades of move fast and break things, isn't it? I mean, isn't that just kind of how we've gotten here? That's my best guess.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right. So in this tracking that you do with regard to attrition, 15 to 25 percent. Is that what you said? Yeah. In the next 12 months, likely to move somewhere else. Do you also get qualitative information about like why? Like why are they moving on? Is it similar things?
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right, which can manifest in technical issues, but also bureaucratic issues.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
Right. You're feeling like you're not getting anything done or you're, you're constantly like working Jira tickets and you come in in the morning and you got 20 open tickets and you work eight hours and you sweat and you bleed and you leave and you got 22 open tickets and you're like, I'm never going to, I'm never going to get myself up from here into a place of progress.
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
Developer (un)happiness (Friends)
You just feel like maintenance, maintenance is all it is. And I can see how that would be demoralizing, especially over time.