I think, the main problem of burnout of software engineers lays in keeping the same simplistic behavior patterns for several years. Be them either simple obedience or too authoritarian style of critics and proposals. Autistic engineers especially struggle from these patterns (besides just intransparent culture and communications which cannot be handled individually) leading them either to learned improvement or drowning into poverty sink.

I think, best behavior lines lay somewhere in the middle. You can’t implement a solution that has a good engineering value (correctness, simplicity, flexibility for addons etc.) without forcing an order of concerns. As most problems with “endless” bugs and spaghetti code lay in that people usually can’t tell clearly what they want from software product. Either because of their limited vision with maximalist desires, or because they have too low trust for engineers (however this can be solved with isomorphic abstract entities: ex. substitute “an s-coin” with “a fun gem” but structure remains the same). So my position for this is to talk until I get necessary preconditions and postconditions for implementation (I’m not of type of a “sonic sports player”, leave this for masc phenotypical people). That’s how I once implemented one feature for which no ready tools were present, in one iteration without bugs meeting pretty short deadlines (it was 3-4 days before X-Mas).

However, you can’t simply enforce your suggestions and questions. Otherwise, you will be claimed as “toxic authoritarian guy”. People needs a feedback. A positive feedback provides them a more sense of value of their actions. A negative feedback does the opposite. Negative feedback should not break their hard incentives (this is hard to know for ASD-ie from the first place, though I follow a “socialized autist” path with periodic informal meets). Otherwise, what’s called as “loosing trust” happens. This is like constantly DDoS-ing some service in wish that it removes some noisy popups from their site. But it bans your IP instead.

#blog #work