80% of programmers are NOT happy… why?

you know that feeling when your alarm clock wakes you up at 6:00 a.m. and you have to go to work again because you didn't die in your sleep well you're not alone 80% of professional developers know this feeling according to the 2024 stack Overflow survey results one in three programmers actively hate their job while nearly half are just plowing through life Shackled to their comfort zone and that leaves only 20% with delusions of Happiness personally I could pound my keyboard all day and be happy and that's why I found these results quite shocking programmers are

well paid get tons of vacation can work remote and even when forced back into the office they usually have nap pods and adult ball pits to help ward off depression but apparently that's not enough in today's video we'll dissect the brain of the modern code monkey and examine its weird environment to find the truth about why farmers and plumbers are statistically more happy and most importantly what you can do to cope about it it is July 29th 2024 and you're watching the code report last week the stack Overflow annual survey was released with over 65,000

responses from professional developers around the world and it contains a ton of surprising insights about the current state of programmers and Technology not only will we look at this data but also anecdotes from strangers on the internet to shed light on the underappreciated problems faced by those who code reason number one dollar dollar bills y'all money can't buy happiness but let's be real you've never seen anyone cry while driving a Lambo programmers are well paid but not as well paid as you might think they say if you learn PHP you're guaranteed a Lambo but here's

a reality check PHP is almost the lowest paid language with a median salary of 49k and to make matters worse this was a decline from last year the reality is that every PHP millionaire like Zuck or levels is also an entrepreneur the actual problem with PHP is that it's popular and you'll notice that less popular specialized languages like llang and lowlevel languages like rust earn better salaries the best way to make more money though is to Simply respawn in the United States where salaries are higher or learn how to talk to people so you can

become a manager someday paradoxically though the depression rates are much higher in the United States than say southeast Asia so maybe it is true that money doesn't act actually buy happiness if you're getting into programming just for the money you might want to rethink that plan reason number two technical debt the number one shared frustration among professional developers is technical debt and this is what technical debt actually looks like this code base is ugly and flawed but it gets the job done so we'll just keep building on top of it because starting over is too

hard this process goes on for years and decades until the codebase is filled with to do I'll fix it later comments and when you run get blame to find out why the build fails when you remove this one line of code it pulls up the obituary of some guy who worked there 8 years ago that means the best thing to do is just not touch this code we all want to do good work but it's nearly impossible when faced with soul sucking technical debt but what can you do about it well to be honest pretty

much nothing it's no one programmer's fault but a systemic issue caused by reason number three hustle or die culture as you write code you've got Tech lead pressuring you to close out all these tickets before the end of the Sprint who's being pressured by the engineering manager to ship this product by the end of the quarter who's being pressured by the VP to execute on the product strategy who's being pressured by the CEO to jack up Revenue who's being pressured by Black Rock to beat earnings who's being pressured by Anonymous deep State trillionaires to fund

intradimensional Wars beyond your comprehension the machine has to keep moving and all this pressure is eventually released through the boots on the ground software Engineers which come in the form of unrealistic timelines and expectations now what you can do about it is quit your job the turnover rate among software Engineers is extremely high because unlike many other Industries you can often make a lot more money by switching jobs but you still might not be happy if you end up working for a corporate dinosaur where you become nothing more than a cog many companies are so

bloated with bureaucracy that it becomes nearly impossible to get anything done when programmers have to go to meetings to schedule pre-meetings to discuss the agenda for the upcoming meeting about last week's meeting they start to become disillusioned Victor Frankle showed us how a man can find meaning in life despite the most horrific of circumstances like an extermination camp but he never had to get programming work done between seven meetings with product managers who have conflicting requirements meetings might kill your focus But ultimately it's hard to be happy if you feel like your work is contributing

nothing of value to the world now even if you have a great job a great salary and a great boss you'll probably get laid off around the age of 25 when you become too old to code all the recent layoffs and The Hangover from the co boom has blackpilled a large segment of the industry but programming can also be very unhealthy physically according to science being chained to a chair all day is more unhealthy than smoking but also according to science exercise is one of the best if not the best medicine for depression so that's

an easy bug to fix but even if it is is true that 80% of programmers are not happy the best way to cope is to realize that out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls and the most massive characters are seared with scars this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one