What makes developers happy at work

I think it depends on the developer, I dislike environment not working type problems and I think a lot of developers are the same, however this is rather an arbitrary thing, debugging a problem in the code that means the product I am working on is not working can make me happy (can, it can also drive me crazy) but trying to make a bunch of virtual machines work correctly or trying to figure out why my editor has suddenly decided to mark bits of code as errors and refuse to save things when I do command-s drives me absolutely bonkers and the degree of psychological damage it inflicts is directly related to how long the environment is not working or how frequent the problems are (as has been happening to me currently).

Whereas I think some developers find those problems just as wonderful, which is sensible because after all it is somewhat arbitrary that I find writing code in a text file enjoyable and they like writing configuration settings and commands in a terminal.

Every year there's some new survey saying something different is the most important factor to happiness at work. I thought the Google research which determined that psychological safety was the most important factor was really interesting because it didn't rely on multiple-choice surveys.

I'd almost rather just read like ten mini-essays from ten randomly chosen developers who try to explain what makes them happy at work in their own words. I mean, I have conversations like that with people at work and I've never heard anyone say "salary" is the most important. Usually it's feeling proud at having solved a hard problem, or being proud of having shipped a product used by real customers. And I don't see either of these things on this survey.

Related: the Stack Overflow community was initially resistant to having career-related questions on the site:

"It was always our hope that concrete, substantive programming career questions could be asked on Stack Overflow, and some early ad-hoc polling indicated that career questions might be accepted by the community, but if you look at later poll results, it's clear that the career questions came out juuuust under the cutoff point as determined by the Stack Overflow community"

From Jeff Atwood, circa 2013 at https://blog.codinghorror.com/so-you-dont-want-to-be-a-progr...