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Do developers lose most of their time to tech debt and broken tooling?

2 points by Saurabh_Kumar_ ↗ HN
Hey everyone I'm a non-technical founder trying to understand a problem before building anything I keep hearing developers say they spend more time dealing with tech debt, flaky tests, broken onboarding, and tooling issues than actually shipping features - which leads to burnout and slow delivery. I want to sanity-check this with real developers: What wastes most of vour time day-to-day ? Is tech debt / tooling friction really a big problem, or is something else worse? If you could magically fix one thing in your dev workflow, what would it be? I'm not selling anything or promoting a product - just trying ta understand the problem honestly Thanks for your time. Saurabh.

2 comments

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LouDNL
For me as the only developer at the company I work for it's either having to break creative (thinking) flow to switch to anything else that is expected or asked from me by my employer/colleagues, my own thought process wandering off due to unexpected hickups / issues I come across and have to fix first, or not remembering why or how I made something the way I did. On top of that it's also having to figure out my predecessors code descriptions.
JohnFen
In my experience, it depends. In most of the places I've worked, tech debt and broken tooling has not been a substantial problem. In some, they have. I think how that shakes out has more to do with management than anything else.

> If you could magically fix one thing in your dev workflow, what would it be?

That also depends on the company. Where I'm at now, it would be how documentation is handled.