2017/03/15 by Daniel Graziotin, Fabian Fagerholm, Xiaofeng Wang +1 · 2 voices · 89 citations
Computer Science · Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Burnout #Clinical psychology #Computer science #Creativity in Education and Neuroscience #Data science #Flourishing #Happiness #Medicine #Mind wandering and attention #Population #Positive psychology #Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction #Psychology #Social psychology #Software #Software development #cs.CY #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3084226.3084242
published as In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE'17), 2017. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 324-333 · 11 pages, 1 figure. Final version. Accepted for presentation at the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE'17)
arxiv created 2017/05/10 · openalex publication_date 2017/06/09 · arxiv updated 2017/07/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The happy-productive worker thesis states that happy workers are more productive. Recent research in software engineering supports the thesis, and the ideal of flourishing happiness among software developers is often expressed among industry practitioners. However, the literature suggests that a cost-effective way to foster happiness and productivity among workers could be to limit unhappiness. Psychological disorders such as job burnout and anxiety could also be reduced by limiting the negative experiences of software developers. Simultaneously, a baseline assessment of (un)happiness and knowledge about how developers experience it are missing. In this paper, we broaden the understanding of unhappiness among software developers in terms of (1) the software developer population distribution of (un)happiness, and (2) the causes of unhappiness while developing software. We conducted a large-scale quantitative and qualitative survey, incorporating a psychometrically validated instrument for measuring (un)happiness, with 2220 developers, yielding a rich and balanced sample of 1318 complete responses. Our results indicate that software developers are a slightly happy population, but the need for limiting the unhappiness of developers remains. We also identified 219 factors representing causes of unhappiness while developing software. Our results, which are available as open data, can act as guidelines for practitioners in management positions and developers in general for fostering happiness on the job. We suggest considering happiness in future studies of both human and technical aspects in software engineering.