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April 16, 2017 08:00 am

Researchers Determine What Makes Software Developers Unhappy

Researchers recently surveyed 2,200 software developers to calculate the distribution of unhappiness throughout the profession, and to identify its top causes, "incorporating a psychometrically validated instrument for measuring (un)happiness." An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:Daniel Graziotin and his team found their survey subjects via GitHub. Contact information was found by mining archived data for past public GitHub events, where email addresses are apparently more plentiful. They wound up with 33,200 records containing developer locations, contact information, and employers. They took a random sampling from this dataset and wound up with about 1,300 valid survey responses... According to survey results released earlier this month, software developers are on average a "slightly happy" group of workers... Survey responses were scored according to the SPANE-B metric, a standard tool used in psychology to assess "affect," defined as total negative feelings subtracted from total positive feelings. It ranges from -24 to 24. The mean score found in the developer happiness survey was 9.05. Slightly happy. The minimum was -16, while the maximum was 24. So, even in the worst cases, employees weren't totally miserable, whereas in the best cases employees weren't miserable at all. The paper -- titled "On the Unhappiness of Software Developers" -- found that the top cause of unhappiness was being stuck while solving a problem, followed by "time pressure," bad code quality/coding practices, and "under-performing colleague." And since happiness has been linked to productivity, the researchers write that "Our results, which are available as open data, can act as guidelines for practitioners in management positions and developers in general for fostering happiness on the job...unhappiness is present, caused by various factors and some of them could easily be prevented."

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