Software engineers feel burnt out from long hours
28 posts across 12 communities in the last 30 days; 50% from r/cscareerquestions.
“You can love this field without dedicating every second of your life to it. Do you expect doctors to diagnose people outside of their work hours? Therapists to analyze people? Then why is it different for programmers?”
“I love what i do but there are some aspects of it i dont and would like to have employees do for me but training them on how to do it feels impossible. It’s mostly all the stock ordering and paperwork stuff that sucks for me”
“Do you swap out a weekday on those release days? Like, not work Friday at all because there's a Saturday release? Why are there weekend releases anyway?? Move that shit to Monday or Tuesday in case stuff goes wrong?”
Several posts express exhaustion and burnout related to excessive working hours, often citing practices like '996' (working 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) and similar demanding schedules. Some mention the pressure within large organizations and the desire for better work-life balance.
SOURCES (60)
“You hiring ? Lol [re: Industry folks: How many hours do you actually work each week?]”
“Like, why don't I just stay in the middle of the pack and relax more instead? Why login to my computer at 8:00 pm tonight and do a bunch of extra work? submitted by /u/Big_Eggplant7591 [link] [comments]”
“compared to FAANG where you are working on multiple apps/teams that affect millions of users This is the opposite of reality. A lot of smaller jobs have you working on multiple projects at once, because they don't have the manpower to focus on one. BigN companies do, and so have an entire team built around individual microservices. I had far more responsibilities at the small companies compared to BigN.”
“Sorry for the trolls. I truly have no idea these days. Putting effort into anything seems like such a waste of time. I was going through some books online, and figured "what's even the point?" So I'm looking forward to see what other people will post and are doing.”
“> But they’re really good at talking up a big game. Isn’t that the job? I mean you and I would both like it to be meritocracy, and that your work is actually viewed and weighed by leadership. But the industry didn’t go that way.”
it's what students/new grads believe cuz that's what tech tok tells them
“I just do it because I intended to build profitable software on the side , not only for the fun of it”
“Expected by who? I’ve done a grand total of three weeks in my entire career of 30 years doing unpaid work and I was doing that as a favor to a non profit”
“Depends on how different the side project is from the day job. The vast majority of people get off of work and do something else, like get dinner going, go to the gym, play games, watch TV, sometimes seek mental help if the job is murdering them, it depends on the person.”
“I try to make a little progress, 1-2 hours a week. I don't feel obligated to keep trying if I'm tired or there are other things to do.”
“coz I love it? my job is reasonably challenging but even so my side projects are far more complex.”
“Rage against corporate does wonders, also building redundancy against layoffs.”
“It’s not expected, I’ve never done this in my decade of experience and only met one other person who did but he was building a whole business.”
“Gotta check your tone there mate. Firstly, just because someone else does it, doesn’t mean you have to do it. Secondly, no one needs to justify why they code in their free time.”
“You can love this field without dedicating every second of your life to it. Do you expect doctors to diagnose people outside of their work hours? Therapists to analyze people? Then why is it different for programmers?”
“I'm a software guy because I like writing code. It's that's simple really. I've dabbled in many things over the years - almost all incomplete - because I've an idea I want to try, a prototype I want to flesh out, or a language/tech I want to learn. Sometimes I have an idea about how to solve a problem and I want to see if it's performant. If it isn't, how about if I parallelise it? Maybe if I just add heavy caching? Perhaps if I preprocess more up front to save time l”
“I used to work on the Linux kernel when my day job was too boring, but stopped after I found jobs with more interesting software engineering projects.”
“Industry varies from like FinTech, Tech, Semiconductor, etc. Super team dependent in terms of hours but most of most of my teams I was in office 9-7. And then finish up at home for like 2-3 hours depending on workload.”
“Not stuck in an office with all your work done, or have to be available for meetings, but does anyone work less than 40 hrs/week (and is doing fine financially). submitted by /u/YoungandBeautifulll [link] [comments]”
Yes I know, that's why I said 500 developers. Which is ridiculous.
“Honestly, I've never kept to a schedule for software dev. It doesn't happen. Thats why agile methodologies exist. People on here may say I suck at my job but a lot of dev is about identifying unknowns and adding them in. Manage risks and dependencies explicitly and aggressively as they come up and communicate to the business.”
“If you work 8am-9pm then will expect you to deliver the work you deliver working so long. You are giving them the wrong idea, because they think you work 8-5. In this line of work you will never be finished, you will never have nothing left to do, you will always have more work coming than going. What you are doing is, mildly said, not very wise. What you should be doing off working time is learning rather than doing more work, if anything.”
“Depends on the day. There's currently only 20 people in it. Some days they'll be one or two people in voice chat with me and other days I'll have a music bot in one of the channels so I chill in there and listen to music if no one is online and if someone joins we'll talk while we work. Sometime we sit in quite, sometimes we talk about random stuff, it just depends.”
“Every company I've ever worked has two teams tha actually make money: Sales and Engineering, everyone else is there to take a salary and does not contribute anything of value. Ironically, those are the people who are fired last while the teams actually making money are most commonly on the chopping block”
“working hard doesn't matter if you aren't strategic about what you're working on SWEs made ridiculous amounts of money in the 2010s for so little work. that obviously wasn't going to last, no one should have been betting their careers on that.”
“yeah if the work itself feels like a chore every single day thats a pretty clear sign”
“Yeah, when you actually list all of that out it really puts things into perspective. People see the software and assume that is the whole company but there is an entire ecosystem behind keeping a product running, secure, supported and actually usable at scale.”
“I worked for a banking app in france (basically French venmo), 5 millions users (at the time), we were less than 100 employees. Big tech companies grow at a ridiculous scale, there are way too many people and everything is slow. In France we have doctolib, it's an app for people to book appointments with doctors, and doctors can manage everything from the platform. They have 500 developers, this is ridiculous. That's why even though they have a monopoly they still don't make money.”
“Yeah seriously...I'm like did OP ever work for any company? Not hard to imagine how the have 2k employees. Actually they could probably have much more”
“I love what i do but there are some aspects of it i dont and would like to have employees do for me but training them on how to do it feels impossible. It’s mostly all the stock ordering and paperwork stuff that sucks for me”
“Because modern software is a labyrinth of complexity and keeping the plane flying while modifying it in the air is kind of hard? And leaders demanding speed makes it even harder? And their instinct when teams slow down is to hire more people, because none of them read "mythical man month"?”
lol noticed that too, everyone's building but nobody says what
Is this a joke? Or, have you never worked at a modern tech company?
“Compare that to a company like Microsoft which has over 200,000 employees. It kind of makes sense”
“Eh the ones with unions actually break the mould, and can end up in this weird, seemingly paradoxical state where there's tons of people vying for those jobs but very high pay. Airline pilots are one of the best examples actually. At the major airlines those guys are pulling $400k as captains. But that's not because there's a lack of qualified turbofan-certified pilots that have thousands of hours of flying experience... It's because the airline unions have negotiated huge pay pa”
“As I said, I don't think you should do it every day all night. I'm not going to quit gaming because I work in software. I enjoy it. I mentioned exercise and active activities in my list as well.”
“don't rely on workplace for your friend network. Work buddies don't really translate well into ppl you hang out with nights/wkds. Pick up a social hobby, boardgames, rock climbing, social dancing. Get a better dating app profile etc. Meet people that way. Work is for money, not primary way of socializing”
“> I hardly do 2 hrs of actual work and the rest is just pretending to be busy/grabbing coffee/learning and upskilling. In my experience this has always been what SWE is like lol.”
Then you don’t have time to write that much code in a day.
“It is boring. Ha. I started working professionally in 1999. It was an exciting time. Riding razor scooters through the office. Big budgets. Red bull cans stacked to the ceiling. Monday morning deadlines. You felt like a coding rockstar. Now I do more process streamlining so the agent can work for the next hour more efficiently. And I get on my phone and waste that hour. Not very fun. Ha.”
“Do you swap out a weekday on those release days? Like, not work Friday at all because there's a Saturday release? Why are there weekend releases anyway?? Move that shit to Monday or Tuesday in case stuff goes wrong?”
“thats pretty much the sweet spot imo, no mandatory hours but still staying around 40 is solid”
“Right? It’s not that bad. I work in ERP consulting. Yea the hours can be long at times but I am at 99% of my kids events and I coach. Little travel to break up the remote aspect Good insurance, bills paid, putting some away for vacations Keeping eyes open for bigger things but for only 12 years in I feel very happy with the balance If the economy was not so expensive, I would be living real good hahahaha”