Comment by myWindoonn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by myWindoonn | Hacker News Reader

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Your arguments are specious; perhaps you're simply angry that you didn't understand an industry you've worked in for a while? Perhaps you're in management, or in the 20% who aren't burnt out, and you're embarrassed by proxy?

Psychological experiments and surveys are often done in only one or two days. Why would a wider window of time help when taking a snapshot of a current situation?

Hm, is 258 a small sample size? Let's put in some effort instead of just screaming "bullshit" a bunch. There are approximately 408,000 people in the entire population [0], and plugging everything into a calculator, we get two results: First, they should have tried to poll around 400 people (and perhaps they did!), but more importantly, the 95% confidence interval is only around ±6%.

Let me repeat that more clearly: By typical polling standards (95% confidence interval, random sample from filtered population), we expect that 77-89% of UK software developers are actually burnt out. That is still three out of every four people in the industry!

Not sure what to say. Take a stats class?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/318818/numbers-of-progra...

All of those calculations assume a random sample which this was not:

"To reduce self-selection bias, invitations to complete surveys were sent out to members of Survation’s panel and the surveys were then conducted by online interview. This approach is far more rigorous than say, running a poll on a website in which anyone can choose to take part."

Are "members of Survation's panel" a random subset of developers? How many invitations were sent out to get 238 responses (i.e. what was the response rate)? Are developers with burnout more likely to respond to a survey about burnout? Was the sample population demographically similar to the overall population of developers?

It's a lot and I'm not surprised. Recent research in my country (from a reputable institute, the Netherlands) mentions 1 out of 6 people feel burnout and ranks IT industry in the top 3 sectors. This survey articulates it in quite a broad way however, just asking if respondents have 'feelings of burnout', which most of us have once in a while.

That doesn't mean they are burned out clinically speaking, or even if they have symptoms of burnout. It does point to a large, systematic problem in the industry (and society in general).

Your comment starts with a disingenuous sentence, and continues to show a level of bitterness I've seen before in people who believe themselves to be more knowledgeable/experienced than their surroundings (or they actually are), but never got a chance (or so they believe).

I didn't claim to know everything there is to know about statistics and research in general, but I think I know enough to tell that this is not a study, but a marketing campaign for whatever this usehaystack thing is.

> First, they should have tried to poll around 400 people (and perhaps they did!),

If you had read the article, you would have known that that's not what they did.

> By typical polling standards (95% confidence interval, random sample from filtered population), we expect that 77-89% of UK software developers are actually burnt out. That is still three out of every four people in the industry!

Do I understand correctly that you've worked on this? That certainly explains the hostility, but nevertheless.

> we expect that 77-89% of UK software developers are actually burnt out.

That's not what the link/study says.

> That is still three out of every four people in the industry!

This is absolutely wrong, without a shred of a doubt.

I recommend that you read: How to lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff.

I didn't produce this survey. I just know how to compute confidence intervals. I'm not going to regurgitate the Wikipedia article on confidence intervals at you; it's clear that you don't really want to learn how statistics work, and you'd rather feel smug because you surely know better than to consider a survey of your fellow people.

Just read other replies. I'm not going regurgitate other comments to you. You're clearly way more annoyed by this than average. I don't feel like this is worth engaging with anymore.

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