Best ways to kill the software engineer willpower

Developers are under constant fire. Bugs, deadlines, and a lot of abstractions. Really easy to lose the willpower to code.

Why developers don’t like coding? Paychecks are good. You sit all day. You don’t do any physical labor.

What aggravates developers the most?

Meaningless coding jobs

For any software engineer, this is by far, the best way to lose interest. Lose interest in coding. You become a drag-n-drop developer.

Drop-in a plugin, add a few adjustments, job well done. It is easy money, but no valuable progress.

Freelance developers can’t pick work. They work on adult sites, scams, and Ponzi schemes.

Imagine your friends asking about work. You would feel upset about this, and leave programming for good.

Micromanagement

Ask developers every day for status reports. Even better, ask them every hour.

Push them to finish that feature. Ask them constantly about the progress.

Change scope. Change it mid-sprint. To agitate on the developer’s pain.

Impossible schedule

Notify them about the critical bug on friday. Expect, the fix in few hours.

Don’t think about their well-being. Ask them to deliver. Deliver instantly.

Don’t provide the best tools

Blame everything on them. Build failed? It’s your fault. Not that we don’t have CI in place. Your fault.

Work with legacy systems. Then question why developers are not happy. The answer presents itself.

Dysfunctional team composition

Testers don’t match the developers. You’re pulling your hair to explain basic features. You’re drained from all that explaining.

Even after you explain. Testers don’t test properly. Bugs occur. You lose your motivation to work.

Tech debt

Code is locked down. No changes. It works. Don’t touch it.

And tech debt takes its toll. Developers get to a breaking point.

The point at which one can’t add code. Changes on feature X break feature Y, or even worse problems occur.

Unclear software requirements

Business giving requirements directly to developers. Never works well. Without a good business analyst, it is impossible to do work.

You’re constantly bombarded with dumb requests.“Margins are bad”,_“why is this not brown?”._While performance issues are causing more and more customers to click away.

Disruption of flow

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Constant meetings. You drop from one to join another one. Talks about mundane things.

Disrupting your code flow. Directly impacting your will to code.

Conclusion

Times are hard. Your mental health is important.

Leave bad businesses. New opportunities do come up. Don’t stay and feel upset, leave and find a better workplace.

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