80% of programmers are NOT happy… why?

An analysis of the 2024 StackOverflow survey results where only 20% of programmers reported being happy at their software engineering jobs. Let's look at 6 reasons why professional developers become unhappy at work.

#programming #tech #thecodereport

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🔖 Topics Covered

- Analysis of trends in programming careers
- What makes developers unhappy?
- Should I become a programmer?
- Should I get a CS degree?
- Drawbacks for working as a programmer
- Job outlook for software engineers

[ANONYMOUS-qxyx]

Money cant buy happiness but poverty cant buy anything

[excelmaster]

80% said yes to "Are you sad?", the other 20% didn't speak English

[Swenthorian]

The coding part was fine; it was all the corporate bullshit preventing us from coding: literal days-long meetings; incompetent leadership, management, and businesspeople; and the pointlessness of the projects we worked on.

[LettersAndNumbers]

Programming now means being a digital clerk, 90% administration and meetings, 10% coding, depending on your company 0% room for creativity.

[alexandru-viorelmarin]

I’m not depressed cause I’m a programmer, I’m a programmer cause I’m depressed .

[bryanzawlocki]

Imagine as a plumber you need to fix a broken pipe but your toolbox decided to arbitrarily change the name of your ratchetWrench to ratchetingWrench and changed the switch from tight/loose to in/out, but forgot to add that detail in the updated ratchet manual and before you can grab your toolbox from your truck that contains your wrench, you discover your keys to your truck no longer work, so you have to get new keys but the new keys only work in a new truck, so you have to get a new truck for $79, 000

[sorcdk]

There are also those "fun" open office enviroments, where you are constantly brought out of focus and has to constantly strain yourself mentally to just get a medicrum of work done.

[whatthechaos]

I love my programming job, but these are things that help immensely
- Building a side business that you can eventually scale to leave your programming job. This way you always have that as an option if leadership changes at your company.
- Combat sports or high intensity sports to make up for the lack of day-to-day movement
- Strength training twice a week and then scaled to once a week once your body looks and feels great
- Time outdoors for peaceful walks, reflection, and passive debugging of code
- Find a GF or BF that supports you and doesn’t try to overload your schedule with stressful and unimportant things.
- Stop eating processed foods. Take 30-45 minutes to properly cook food with healthy ingredients and your body will thank you for it. Everyone is different, but beef, dairy, and fruit works best for me.
- if you’re unfamiliar with stoic philosophy, get familiar with some.

Ive been professionally programming for 14 years and this has been working perfectly for me for the past 3 years. Any notions of depression seems like a distant memory for me.

[milanlabus]

if employed programmers are depressed how depressed are unemployed programmers

[MrRaylith]

Remember guys: 'Pain is temporary'.
And as we know, nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution.

[techgroveusa]

Money is unlikely to equal happiness, but creating value and being passionate about your work helps. The challenges with technical debt and work culture are particularly relatable.

[shaggybreeks]

I got started too late in life, so nobody wanted to hire me. They figure if you're over 30, you can't be up to date. I was passionate about programming for about 15 years. Dreamed in code. All that interest has faded. One thing that got to me was all that energy you would put into creating a new app, ... just to see it become obsolete and useless in a few years. That ONE reason is why I would rather have been a stone mason. It's nice to revisit your work from time to time, and you can when you've built something physical and useful. With programming, all your work just washes away after a while.

[cptbaker]

"You have to go to work again because you didn't die in your sleep." Brother, truer words have never been spoken.

[BlakeGillman]

Nailed it. It's not the money or the work that make programmers hate their life. It's their boss/manager / unrealistic expectations / infinite meetings / bad & constantly stressful work environment.

[MrChester]

The part about tech debt hit me hard. We have so much shitty code at our company it's exhausting to work on it. Sometimes I feel like everyone who worked here before me was a complete idiot but then I remember that they were in the same spot as me and didn't have time to refactor this junk for the next 2 weeks risking breaking something. Then I add my shitty workaround, push it and call it a day.

[Oldbettie]

Programmers used to be a rare breed it took loads of hard work to even become a programmer, those that did get good enjoy it because they crossed the skill hump.
These days every man and their dog has done a 3 month bootcamp and is unhappy writing javascript because it's "not what instagram said it was".

Ditto the above paragraph for technical debt...

[pikolino]

I quit my job last year because I had been assigned to a long term project highly in technical debt and it was depressing to deal with the same morons every day. At my new job, I got assigned to a long term project which is highly in debt, with a bunch of morons, but I'm getting paid twice as much as before. Modern problems require modern solutions.

[belizarius_]

Record financial results - little to no pay rise. Bad financial results - little to no pay rise and layoffs. And "anonymous" satisfaction surveys, ofc.

[theflexitech]

I took a programming class in highschool, and the teacher told me straight up, if you are good at this job, you will be on call, and a total slave to your company, or you can be sub par and scoot on.

[JohnCena-fdyw]

i like that these videos are very to-the-point instead of taking the 5 minutes of content and stretching it to 15 minutes with filler words. thank you