In early 2021, engineering firm Haystack Analytics and survey firm Survation conducted a joint research project. It was aimed at understanding and examining the impact of professional burnout on people working in the IT industry.

The results turned out to be shocking even to the researchers themselves. They show that 83% software engineers reported professional burnout. According to 47% respondents, workload is the main cause, 31% pointed to ineffective processes, and 29% listed unclear goals and tasks. This is all the more worrying as the modern economy is largely based on the IT industry. Statistica estimated that despite the increase in professional burnout, the global population of programmers will increase to nearly 29 million by 2024.

The last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have worsened the situation. According to the report, as many as 81% developers reported increased professional burnout due to the coronavirus. There are supposed to be several reasons for this state of affairs. The most frequent one was a significant increase in the amount of work resulting from the needs of society. It is on the shoulders of programmers that the burden of supplying countries and private companies with tools enabling not only work in the home office system has fallen – today we can perform almost every activity remotely. Online banking, online shopping, and even conducting school classes – all this has been provided to us thanks to the increased work of the IT industry. This is followed by the associated overtime and stress. The top three reasons for feeling burnout during the pandemic in the survey were:

• overwork,
• general anxiety related to COVID-19,
• uncertainty of the future.

Concern about the quality of the created software was also important, it was mentioned by as many as 83% respondents, and 55% pointed to frequent delays in the implementation of projects. The data collected from the 258 people surveyed by Haystack Analytics may not reflect the exact situation in the development industry. However, they undeniably show a trend that has been emerging in recent years. More and more companies are noticing it and are starting to create their own indicators of productivity and job satisfaction, which ultimately have a huge impact on the potential occurrence of professional burnout among employees.