---
title: 'The Worst Thing About Being a Software Engineer'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=fbhOMKdLd1w'
video_id: 'fbhOMKdLd1w'
date: 2026-08-02
duration_sec: 555
---

# The Worst Thing About Being a Software Engineer

> Source: [The Worst Thing About Being a Software Engineer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=fbhOMKdLd1w)

## Summary

This video candidly discusses the downsides of being a software developer, countering the glamorous portrayal often seen online. The creator highlights five major challenges: the constant need to learn outside work hours, long working hours, poor management understanding, and the stress of on-call duties. It offers a realistic perspective for those considering or currently in the field.

### Key Points

- **Continuous Learning Outside Work** [00:16] — Developers must constantly learn new technologies and languages outside office hours, often without company-provided training time. This requires self-study through blogs, newsletters, and courses on platforms like Udemy and Pluralsight.
- **Long Working Hours** [01:15] — Software development often involves 50-60 hour weeks, especially at startups or top tech companies, with much of the overtime unpaid. This can lead to burnout, and the book 'Your Money or Your Life' suggests that after accounting for commute and expenses, effective hourly pay may be minimum wage.
- **Agile and Burnout** [02:58] — Agile methodology creates a never-ending conveyor belt of work with no rest periods, unlike waterfall projects. Constant priority changes and lack of downtime contribute to burnout, which is hard to recover from without significant time off.
- **Management Misunderstanding** [04:22] — Management often doesn't understand programming, treating developers like assembly line workers. They think adding more developers speeds up projects, but software development is more like painting a picture—adding more people can slow things down due to training and coordination overhead.
- **On-Call Stress** [06:15] — On-call duty is the worst aspect, requiring developers to be available to fix production issues at any time, even at night. This disrupts personal life, causes anxiety (even PTSD-like symptoms), and is more common for backend developers.

### Conclusion

The video provides a sobering look at the less glamorous aspects of software development, emphasizing the importance of recognizing these challenges before entering the field. It suggests that while the salary is attractive, the hidden costs in time, stress, and work-life balance can be significant.

## Transcript

There's a lot of content on YouTube that says how great it is or the offices that look like a playground or the massive salaries and software about these five things that really suck about being a software developer.
The first one is how much you need to learn outside of office hours. whether it be new technologies or the language itself.
They just care that you get the job done and you meet all your deadlines. And usually there's so much work in the sprint, there's no time for learning, that you need to do to be able to be a senior developer.
If the company that you're working for doesn't give you any time for training, You don't need to be doing it every night, but you need to do a little bit to go from a junior developer to a senior developer in bite sized chunks
In most other jobs, you can kind of forget about work as soon as you get home, but you need to continue learning as a software developer, which means subscribing to the various blogs and newsletters to keep you up to date.
As well as taking courses on Udemy and Pluralsight, for example. about being a software developer is the long hours. Now, if you want a job that is just 9 to 5 and you go home, then software
Most software developer jobs in that contract will have around 40 hours a week. especially if you're working for a start up or one of the top tech companies. 50 to 60 hours a week and most of that is going to be unpaid,
a production issue that rears its head at 5:00 on a Friday. Software developers just tend to end up working longer hours, but in a lot of cases you're going to be signing over
even though the high salary can be really tempting. It's There's this great book called Your Money or Your Life, and in it, it covers how much you're actually earning based on the hours that you're working
and the amount of money you spend to be happy in the job that you're in. you take account of that and your commute and everything else you end up earning minimum wage even though you're on a six figure salary.
like your Facebook, Google or Amazon, the work life balance is practically nonexistent. for a smaller tech company, then generally it does get a bit better.
And you might find once it gets near the deadline, you might have to do a bit of crunch time, as they call it, and put in the extra hours If you're constantly working long hours, you're eventually going to be exhausted
I think part of the problem that burnout is so common in software engineering is that companies tend to work using Agile. which essentially is just a never ending conveyor belt of work.
Unlike when we used to do waterfall projects, you'd have one big project With Agile you're just working one sprint after the next. And half the time when there is a big release, you're already working on the
So there's no rest period with Agile. think about Agile, they think, great, I can make lots of changes, and often So the priorities change, the requirements change.
Now when this happens, it's really frustrating Now, burnout is one of these things that creeps up on you. You haven't got the motivation to do that training
you don't want to get up anymore in the morning. Now it's important to try and recognize the signs of burnout, because once burnout hits,
Unfortunately, the only way to break out of a burnout cycle in most cases You could take a couple of weeks off to try and recover, but if that doesn't help
is still waiting for you. Now my last couple of points really come down to bad management Now, my fourth point is that management don't really understand programing.
what goes into software development Now, when management doesn't really understand programing. They tend to treat programmers as workers on an assembly line.
Now, just like an assembly line, more developers at the problem. It's more like painting a picture.
working on. a different skill level, and you might have a lead painter But each time a new painter joins, you then need to train up that painter,
And that takes time out of everyone on the team. then there might be a limit to the number of painters To make matters worse, there's going to be certain
such as the background which is going to stop other painters from joining in. two painters work on the painting any one time. Now you see, software development is like painting a picture with multiple painters.
You can't have too many of them and everyone needs to know what they're doing. which takes time out of the other developers on the team. if you say you're commissioning a piece of art from an artist,
but you're not going to say "That's not good enough, It just doesn't work that way. They just think they can throw money at the problem.
the domain knowledge that all the developers need to have Now, as promised, I've saved the worst to last And that is on call.
developers are expected to work on call, at least at some point in their career. whose product is live 24/7 and have customers using it. being on call is the worst thing about being a software developer?
Now, when you're on call, you need to be available and ready to log Now, this can vary between companies, but generally you need to be very quick Now, given you're going to be on call outside office hours, it's generally
So if you get a call and it's a production issue, chances open up your laptop and work out what the issue is.
until it's resolved. If it's a minor issue, you might get away with raising a bug and go back to bed. to solve a production issue, you're still expected to work the next day as well.
How bad an experience on call is for you will probably depend on the size of your team and the maturity of the company that you're working for. are going to need to be on call a lot more than larger teams.
Now, larger companies do tend to have on call centers as well. and they'll try and resolve them themselves if they can. of all the various scenarios that can happen and how to solve them.
then they'll call the person that's on call. what the provisions are for on call. Now, some companies will have an OC team that deals with all of the production
will expect the developers to do that as well. for on call work, whether you get called out or not. and if you don't get called out, then that could be a great way
What I really don't like about On Call is the fact that whenever you're on call, You can't go out for a meal. You can't go out to the cinema. You basically need to be about ten meters from your laptop at all times.
It can affect your mental health, and it can affect your relationships as well. almost get PTSD symptoms whenever their phone goes off,
to listen out for that ping and expect it to be something bad. I think are the worst things about being a software developer. Now I do find that when it comes to on
call, backend, developers get called on a lot more than frontend developers do. then you might like to watch this video next. Thank you for watching and I hope to see you in the next video.