Young, Female Developers Burn Out Because of ‘Expectations’(thenewstack.io)
thenewstack.io
Young, Female Developers Burn Out Because of ‘Expectations’
https://thenewstack.io/young-female-developers-burn-out-because-of-expectations/
4 comments
The JetBrains 2021 developer survey[0] shows that a larger proportion of more experienced developers are male, which isn't surprising. But the degree is to some extent. Percentages of respondents' professional coding experience:
[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/
male female other
no prof. 81% 15% 4%
< 1 year 88% 10% 3%
1-2 years 92% 6% 2%
3-5 years 94% 4% 2%
6-10 96% 2% 2%
11-16 96% 2% 2%
16+ years 97% 2% 2%
[0] https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/
Lots of good data in this article.
I gotta say, and I know this may seem harsh to some, but....let me call that waaambulance for you. What a bunch of crybabies. That's just how it feels to me.
People in technology get some of the highest wages on earth. The industry is continuously rated as one of the most stress-free jobs there is, for as long as I've been reading about it.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/slideshows/16-low...
Let's face it. People in tech sit around on their ass every f-ing day (not saying not working, I work in it), nobody crawling up your ass like they do in other jobs.
I mean, have you even read about people who work in the warehouses for Amazon? Every single solitary thing that they do is monitored.
.
This is what actual stress is (from https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-...):
Guendelsberger, 35, only decided to join the blue-collar workforce [at Amazon and Convergys] after losing her job as a senior staff writer at the (now defunct) Philadelphia City Paper. It was part necessity — she needed an income — and part curiosity.
What Guendelsberger learned, she writes, is that she’s “embarrassingly unprepared for what ‘normal’ means outside the white-collar world, and I’ve grossly misjudged what $10.50 an hour is worth to a lot of people.”
Her biggest surprise, she tells The Post, is not just how much abuse her co-workers were willing to endure, but how they remained optimistic and grateful despite often staggeringly brutal conditions.
The work in factories and minimum-wage facilities hasn’t exactly got harder in recent decades, Guendelsberger says. It’s that the jobs have become unreasonably more stressful, mostly due to advanced monitoring technology that meticulously tracks every second of every day for many employees. The reason, weirdly enough, is that their productivity is being compared to robots.
At Convergys, Guendelsberger was “lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company.” Every bathroom visit was clocked from the moment she left her cubicle, and a daily report of her bathroom time was sent to a supervisor for approval.
The workers that Guendelsberger met exemplified these conflicting traits. They described Amazon as an “existential s–thole” but also “accepted that this was just the way things were. They knew they weren’t being treated right, but they tried to look on the bright side.”
At fast-food franchises like McDonald’s, employees are often pushed to work at such dizzying speeds — “like a Benny Hill video on fast forward”— that injuries are inevitable, Guendelsberger explains.
Brittney Berry, who worked at a McDonald’s location in Chicago, told Guendelsberger that while trying to keep up with the pace, she slipped on a wet floor and severely burned her forearm on a grill to the point of nerve damage. “The managers told me to put mustard on it,” Berry told Guendelsberger.
It’s a grim reality that most workers have just learned to live with. “They don’t have an expectation of being treated like human beings,” Guendelsberger says. “It’s become so normalized to be treated like garbage at work and clamp down on your self-respect and dignity.”
Blair, a young working mom [working at Amazon], was especially determined to see how far she could push herself during the randomly announced “Power Hours.” This special incentive challenged workers to fulfill 100 orders in just an hour, with the reward of “a dollar coupon for some — but not all — of the vending machines in the building,” writes Guendelsberger.
People in technology get some of the highest wages on earth. The industry is continuously rated as one of the most stress-free jobs there is, for as long as I've been reading about it.
https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/slideshows/16-low...
Let's face it. People in tech sit around on their ass every f-ing day (not saying not working, I work in it), nobody crawling up your ass like they do in other jobs.
I mean, have you even read about people who work in the warehouses for Amazon? Every single solitary thing that they do is monitored.
.
This is what actual stress is (from https://nypost.com/2019/07/13/inside-the-hellish-workday-of-...):
Guendelsberger, 35, only decided to join the blue-collar workforce [at Amazon and Convergys] after losing her job as a senior staff writer at the (now defunct) Philadelphia City Paper. It was part necessity — she needed an income — and part curiosity.
What Guendelsberger learned, she writes, is that she’s “embarrassingly unprepared for what ‘normal’ means outside the white-collar world, and I’ve grossly misjudged what $10.50 an hour is worth to a lot of people.”
Her biggest surprise, she tells The Post, is not just how much abuse her co-workers were willing to endure, but how they remained optimistic and grateful despite often staggeringly brutal conditions.
The work in factories and minimum-wage facilities hasn’t exactly got harder in recent decades, Guendelsberger says. It’s that the jobs have become unreasonably more stressful, mostly due to advanced monitoring technology that meticulously tracks every second of every day for many employees. The reason, weirdly enough, is that their productivity is being compared to robots.
At Convergys, Guendelsberger was “lectured about how using the bathroom too often is the same thing as stealing from the company.” Every bathroom visit was clocked from the moment she left her cubicle, and a daily report of her bathroom time was sent to a supervisor for approval.
The workers that Guendelsberger met exemplified these conflicting traits. They described Amazon as an “existential s–thole” but also “accepted that this was just the way things were. They knew they weren’t being treated right, but they tried to look on the bright side.”
At fast-food franchises like McDonald’s, employees are often pushed to work at such dizzying speeds — “like a Benny Hill video on fast forward”— that injuries are inevitable, Guendelsberger explains.
Brittney Berry, who worked at a McDonald’s location in Chicago, told Guendelsberger that while trying to keep up with the pace, she slipped on a wet floor and severely burned her forearm on a grill to the point of nerve damage. “The managers told me to put mustard on it,” Berry told Guendelsberger.
It’s a grim reality that most workers have just learned to live with. “They don’t have an expectation of being treated like human beings,” Guendelsberger says. “It’s become so normalized to be treated like garbage at work and clamp down on your self-respect and dignity.”
Blair, a young working mom [working at Amazon], was especially determined to see how far she could push herself during the randomly announced “Power Hours.” This special incentive challenged workers to fulfill 100 orders in just an hour, with the reward of “a dollar coupon for some — but not all — of the vending machines in the building,” writes Guendelsberger.
This part rings true for me about younger devs but I wouldn't have thought of splitting at under over 45.
> Young people are in a hurry. If only they could fix unreliable software and inefficient processes, then their workload problems would be solved! The more mature workforce is wiser, and perhaps that is why they are less likely to be burned out. Here is one more disturbing statistic from the survey. When asked about their workplace, 78% of both female software developers 18-44 years old said it takes less than a week on average to begin working on a feature and reliably deploy it into production. In contrast, men, were slightly less likely (65%) to say so, but only 44% of the 45+ crowd rush to get this done. Learn from your elders.
My interpretation of this is that the men or older crowds are more aware of either the details of what's needed or have a better estimation of the unknown that will be discovered along the way. This is something that comes with experience, being exposed to many situations. Optimism is another way this can be swayed. It is a good trait to have but less so if you have it early and lose it along the way. It would be better to have less at the beginning when less is known and sustain when facing more than anticipated.