Asking a 1,000 Developers What They HATE About Software

We asked 1,000 software developers what they hate about software, and in this video I show a collection of their responses. So what are the bad things about software engineering? What are the downsides of a software developer career? What are the bad things about software engineering?

In this episode Dave Farley reports back on what software developers think of their profession, their working conditions, the technologies that they use and the nature of creating new things with software.

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[johnpritchard]

As opposed to really listening to the people doing the actual work, hiring external consultants to come in tell you where you're going wrong, introduce some scaled Agile nonsense, shoehorn existing managers into roles they don't understand, then bugger off...

[danielgilleland]

You're not dogmatic, Dave. You're just telling us the stories about how you got those bruises and why you'll "never do that again!"

[bobbycrosby]

I hate that people treat abstractions as "free".

I hate it when explicit coupling is replaced with implicit coupling then call it "fixed". Actually, it's worse now.

[prouttralala]

in my current job what I hate the most are : lack of documentation or documentation that is disseminated on multiple servers, not connected, copy paste of the same code over and over, 1 occurrence per customer each time with a slight modification that cannot be added the the previous code, and most of all: specifications that change during the acceptance test.

[rzabcio]

I love your comment about Jira. Beside developer/devops I am also Jira administrator for our 1k employee company (or to be precise all Atlassian apps administrator). I believe my most important task there, one could say crusade even, is to SIMPLIFY as much as possible -- workflows, custom fields and other Jira constructs. The thing is, often project/team leaders and/or PMs decide and design Jira project/workflow settings. And you wouldn't believe how many times I have to explain that something is too complicated, tiresome for users and/or just needless. That's what GOOD Jira administrator should do -- defend user from overwhelming management bureaucracy. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they come back after some time saying "you were right" but... in most cases I talk to a brick wall ("we are used to work like that", "you do not work with customer, you don't know realities").

So, remember, guys, that after every badly configured Jira project, there is some person/s who wanted it to be like that.
Do not evaluate the tool. Because Jira is just a tool -- nothing more, nothing less.

Also, remember that Jira has pretty great REST API, accessible for EVERY user (because web UI uses it), so you could automate almost everything! I've seen many teams writing their own scripts or even whole GUI apps, accelerating their tasks. :)

[zwc]

I've seen "waterfall" work, and it's under medical appliances. The process there really have to be rigid in order to conform to medical standards. Can't really do "fail fast" on something that controls your heartbeat.

[KA-wfrg]

Jira exposes bureaucracy == 100%. And by the way Dave, I love hearing how you present your positions. It makes me want to explain my positions in a way that is calm, well thought out, and non-defensive. I think, and hope, some of that comes with years of experience and realizing all the silly things we can get attached to and argue about are not as important as we think they are.

[tieTYT]

I strongly dislike working with developers with an extremely high tolerance for risk and inefficiency.

[sanderdejong]

8:33 My code using libraries vs. my code shoehorned into a framework. Great insight!

[mhzprayer]

I hate the pace which software is expected to be delivered without incorporating a lot of time to learn and experiment. Most times we don't know the best way to do something. We just figure out SOME way and we have to move on bc the amount is so much. There isnt time to reflect or refactor very often.

[krumbergify]

I was fortunate to join my current project early and I managed to get a load of linters, code formatters, static code analysers and test tools in place before a lot of code was written. Doing this takes care of so much needless code reviewing about style and stops simple bugs before they reach the codebase.

[tristanmills]

Leetcode. Tells you nothing about how someone is as an engineer, but it's ubiquitous. It's a lazy interview technique which shows no thought into what you actually want from an engineer.

[nickbarton]

The problem with frameworks is longevity of support. .NET is a good example, the transition from software built on .NET Framework costs.

[TimJW]

I've just told the team I am temporarily looking after to ditch their k8s cluster. They're data engineers primarily, don't have the skills administer the cluster well, and they're writing a batch processing application....they were spending more time faffing with the cluster rather than solving the customer's problem.

[stephendgreen]

Slow dev environments. We should code at the speed of thought.

[logiciananimal]

I really like the idea that Jira is a "bureaucracy exposer". I'll have to remember that when I explain to newcomers why our Jira is so weird.

[aaronbono]

My biggest hates, move fast and break things which translates to I want to be stupid and sloppy, node and git, that over-engineered and ridiculously complex version control that you can't use properly without a command line. I will give an honorable mention to the vile editor only because I'm not forced to use it.

[moestietabarnak]

As an embedded programmers working with firmware, drivers, low-level I hate the way the web people (or hr?) created the 'fullstack' concept.. as doing web from server to front-end is the WHOLE and any kind of computing...!

[oglop]

I love how you talk about architecture, yet in my 10 years of working I have met only 2 people capable software architects. So the problem is IMO rather simple 90% of developers are poor architects because it is not a commonly taught skill. You'd find in beginner tutorials, etc.. I am not a good architect myself and that makes it even harder to educate others about the problem or push for the better change.