Dev burnout and Tech social media

This article is a tough one to write because we want our overall message as a company to be overwhelmingly positive. With mental health, sometimes it’s hard to talk meaningfully without taking on tough topics. Today we’re writing about developer burnout, and the role social media plays around it. A lot of the topics aren’t specifically about developers and can be applied more broadly, but this is the lens we’re using. These issues don’t just concern developer burnout, they also have the potential to make the community less appealing to newcomers. That’s an issue even if some might say it’s good for job prospects.

It’s easy to put blame on employers for the epidemic of developer burnout we’ve been seeing in the recent years. We’re not going to argue whether they are more to blame than social media, they’re both factors and should both be talked about. As developers, we tend to think of ourselves as smarter than average, and also more technical than the average person. Many of us probably think ourselves too good to fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others online. It’s easy to convince ourselves that we can tell what is real or fake online. Sure, we may be good at combatting this comparison when it comes to the non-tech side of social media - beauty/fitness/health influencers, we can mostly figure out the airbrushing and staged or fake nature of this kind of content. I am concerned that we are not as good at this as we hope when it comes to topics closer to home.

Now there are a couple main areas where this toxicity shows itself.

• In a forum setting.
• Directly from an “influencer” – or “person or organisation who has the attention of a community/following”.

Slightly different dynamics apply for these, so it’s worth noting which is which as we go through the argument.

How the problem begins

You’ve got some free time. You’ve been thinking a lot about programming for some time, either you are already an active developer or you heard about this software thing and want to learn more. You turn to your social media platform of choice to see what people are saying about it. You may even buy a book about it. Almost at once, you are bombarded with content. It all conflicts - everyone is telling you X is the promised way™ and you should never, ever do Y. If you are new to it all - you get overwhelmed by all the advice. Either you quit or you continue long enough to be pushed in various directions over a given amount of time and get used to the way things are and find a way to cope. If you’re moderately experienced, you either have joined a bandwagon and manage to filter out any posts opposing your view, or you pick and choose and hope to get interesting content. Or, should you be a lowlife, you find posts which do not agree with your view and comment on behalf of your tool and saviour. Once you’re sick of all of this you either try to apply more advanced filtering method or change platform.

Tribalism

There are smatterings of tribalism in all human communities. It would be naïve to suggest it wouldn’t come around in tech too. It’s a weird multilevel set of tribes which tend to arise, programming languages are so easy to compare and hold on a pedestal. Some will disdain programming language arguments and still engage in static vs dynamic typing tribalism, or webdev vs systems, or text editor or operating system or…

You get the point.

It’s perhaps built into engineering fields - which are essentially never-ending trade-off analysis rollercoasters, that this will happen. When there is a non-trivial choice to be made, there will always be people willing to argue for either side. With the nature of software being so easy to make/propagate “things”, as opposed to say electronic engineering, where building things is limited by the physical reality of physics, geography and economics. These “things” we build keep getting made (and remade) and people will always propose you use their chosen “thing”.

Often the real good information about a “thing” is hidden among a pile of lower value content. Which makes it hard for people to make good judgements about it. You see lots of beginner content which skips over the underlying principles which really make something interesting. With the result being many people label the “thing” as bad and move on. Arguably this is an issue with the sheer amount of content we are pushed day in and out. We can’t all give every little thing all the time it deserves, because we need to judge what to give the time of day, and that’s hard.

This is made worse when influencers are forced to choose a tribe in order to build a following with any sort of efficiency. Even if they know better, they are almost forced to say things and act a certain way to get anyone to listen to them. Further propagating pointless arguments which are fought with no route for victory or defeat either way.

This rampant tribalism makes it hard for those exposed to it to not either choose a tribe, or feel segregated.

Controversy

Most know one of the main ways influencers “hack” attention is by being controversial. Despite our awareness, social media platforms all reward this type of content, because it plays into human nature and makes them the most money. They fill their titles with obviously leading absolutist statements, to clickbait readers. They may even apologise for the clickbait in their long form content, and clarify their statement. The damage is still done.

This is especially harmful to new devs who can’t read everything, so they never see the clarifications and only ever see the absolutes. Probably one of the most notable examples of this could be Dijkstra’s “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” Paper which clarifies in the text “unbridled use of the go to statement.” Any semi-experienced developer eventually develops an allergy to absolutes, and will notice there are always exceptions. Beginners, however, can end up being led into this realm of absolutes and then add to the weight of the noise, leading to the message becoming immortalised in absolute form.

It’s hard to blame people for doing this. In today’s world, gaining attention is a very competitive game, and so they do what is likely to work the best based on the data we have available. This is tough to take as part of the audience who, as a whole, are encouraging this behaviour. Despite it being the opposite of what we actually want.

Arguing and opinions

Humans as a whole love to argue. Even aside from tribalism, a discipline like software development is a breeding ground for arguments. Specifically for pointless arguments. I think that pointless arguments play a role in inducing burnout or fatigue in developers. The sheer amount of choice we’re presented with means you can solve your problems in essentially an infinite number of ways. Combined with the generally highly opinionated population of developers and boom, pointless arguments abound.

It’s hard to curb this behaviour because discussion is a core part of engineering. If you squint, product development can be boiled down to build, find trade-off, pick solution for trade-off, repeat. For teams, picking solutions for trade-offs becomes a team decision, and when the team has opinionated members, you get arguments, when you should have discussions. There is a lot of content online covering this process. Just picking something, trying it, switching if needed and moving on is often the best course of action. It’s too easy for teams to slip into the fallacy of thinking they can predict future problems if they just plan or talk (argue) things through from the beginning. Hence, you get many pointless time-wasting arguments, and maybe one or two that weren’t a waste of time. Issue being, if one or two arguments aren’t a waste of time, it’s hard to quantify the overall effectiveness of all your arguments as a whole. It just leaves you lamenting wasted time and energy, which is one twig in the kindling of burnout.

Now this is not to say that anyone should stop being opinionated, or care less about what decisions the team makes. Normally there are good reasons why someone has become opinionated, as a result of real experience, but sometimes it’s though joining a hype train or other less reasonable manner. The fundamental thing is to make sure if you’re going to argue or spend non-trivial time discussing something, that it’s very much worth the time to do so. If you’re going to force a team to make a decision, it is important to have one key decision maker who has the final say, and who also is very focused on not allowing the discussion to devolve into pointless arguing in circles.

All this so far hasn’t really touched on social media. If we extend this thinking about internal team arguments up to the scale of social media, we can see how the percentage of pointless arguments skyrockets. It’s great for engagement, because it’s almost entirely rage bait, and as a result people (normally influencers) tend to be rewarded rather than punished for this kind of behaviour. For anyone exposed to this pointless verbal warfare, all they see is strong opinions flying around.

What is worse, is how often these opinions can be formed so easily when someone is trying some new tech out. You’re either in a rush or inpatient or tired, or you’re a streamer stressed by a busy chat, and you skim read a wall of text or avoid the documentation or an LLM hallucinates on you or the tool doesn’t like your particular computer setup or any other countless number of reasons why your first assessment was hampered. Things break or don’t work like you’d hope or expect, you give up on them, label them as broken and never hesitate to express that publicly. I’m convinced there are a sad number of online arguments are propagated through people forming absolutist opinions on tech due to one off reasons like the above and then decide to spread the word.

The workplace isn’t free from the dangers of half-baked opinions either. Gossiping about other groups mistakes or poor choices is too easy to fall into. Some gravitate more to that than others, maybe it tickles their sense of humour and gets them attention. The solution to other group’s problems may seem so simple and obvious, your group may even have solved or avoided the problem. Though so often all this noise is made without knowing the full picture, and just serves to fray relationships or the potential of relationships. Sad, really.

It’s not a good look, and it can be especially confusing for newcomers, who now only see two or more sides to choose from, and never the silent majority who realise the futility of debating what colour the bike shed should be.

Content

Now, moving away from the way people interact with each other online, we can try to look at the content being made around programming. There is a lot of stuff online, and a lot of good stuff, too. However, the bad parts can leave a sour taste.

The most harmful types of titles we see online that I can think of are:

1. How I got X offer at Y big tech firm
2. “Should you learn X language in YYYY?” Or worse; “Learn X now!!!”
3. “Will AI take your job?” Or worse; “AI will take your job!”

You can claim it’s the fault of the viewer picking this low value content, but it’s a self-fulfilling doom spiral because newcomers don’t know what to click on, so they click on these, and creators get the views, so they keep making more of this slop. I don’t think we can blame the newcomers for not knowing what to click on.

The first type is my most hated personally. Salaries are a big topic in the programming community and generates a lot of interest. I’m not naïve enough to think you shouldn’t get into programming for the money. I just pity those who do, because they are prime burnout candidates. They hear stories of anyone getting into a big tech firm and making some huge salary with seemingly zero effort and want to jump on the bandwagon. What a shock they receive when they get somewhere, but then find themselves coming to terms with the reality of a profession, with all the good and bad things around it. Especially in these big tech firms who have a never ending supply of applicants as a result of their fame and success, and therefore less incentive to actually treat their employees well. Welcome burnout. Content glorifying salaries at big tech companies, only continue this trend.

Option 2, I don’t like because it’s overwhelmingly lazy. It makes people second guess their choices, leading to analysis paralysis and more. Once again targeting those who don’t know any better.

Option 3 is obviously just playing on and feeding fear, especially in the current environment, but there are other non AI variations on this. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen any real value provided by a post of this format. Or at least any value is cancelled out by the negative emotions caused by the (normally misleading) title.

Protecting yourself

Content like the above is not going away anytime soon, but remember that our clicks as a whole form the base data for the creators. Spend your clicks wisely. This article isn’t going to make influencers or commenters as a whole think more before they post. It has to be lead by the audience, and even the audience as a whole won’t see this article. So all we can realistically do is offer some meagre advice on how to prevent social media from disturbing your equilibrium.

If you’re new to tech

After reading this article you will now be more aware of the tribalism that exists between different parts of the tech community. Hopefully you will be able to internalise that there is no “one way” to do things. There are no silver bullets despite what anyone tries to sell you. Beware of any influencer preaching their Way™ even if they have a large follower count. Don’t discount their message, because there are always nuggets to be learned from everyone - but don’t beat yourself up if you either don’t get what they’re trying to say, disagree with what they say, or even if you get sucked into their spiel. There are no prizes or penalties for whichever one of these you fall into, so long as you don’t close your mind to other ways or ideas. Try to spot and avoid influencers who make posts which draw you in via fear or are purely job and salary related. Content discussing salaries are likely showing exaggerated numbers to gain views. Do not let yourself be sucked into arguments around technologies, make your own opinions by using or researching the tools yourself and being your own judge.

One way to try and shield yourself from the social media firehose is to maintain your own feed of content from blogs and forums using RSS (article to follow where we expand on this idea, stay tuned).

If you’re in tech

Some of the above advice still stands. Remember that just because your team lead is going against your suggestions, doesn’t mean your product won’t work, or your project won’t succeed. It may not go how you’d expect it to go if you went with your way, and it will have problems, maybe even the problems you foresaw, but it won’t have the problems with your method that you didn’t or couldn’t foresee. Remember to pick your arguments, save your energy for arguments which have a valid outcome, conserve your energy for those, and you may feel better for it. Try and keep track of your bias’s and don’t be afraid to inspect them from time to time, or even to prove them wrong. Never think of your technical choices as immutable, changing your view on any technical concept should always be celebrated, it doesn’t make you indecisive or stupid - it makes you more capable or adaptable than you were before.

We’ll never use these techniques above to gain views. A healthy community is a happy community, and we’re in this for the long game.