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Survey Results

What kills your productivity the most?

Survey period: 11 Dec 2017 to 18 Dec 2017

Sometimes things hum along. Sometimes...they don't.

OptionVotes% 
The programming tools breaking or misbehaving27929.09
The libraries lacking features, being difficult to use, or having bugs22123.04
Nuget or NPM updates introducing breaking changes10210.64
My development machine (slow or broken)19920.75
Your boss or client changing their mind50252.35
The work environment32734.10
My team. They are hard work9710.11
We're using the wrong tools / language / stack / whatever12112.62
Other19720.54
Respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer; totals may not add up to 100%



 
GeneralVisual Studio! Pin
Richard Andrew x6417-Dec-17 5:24
professionalRichard Andrew x6417-Dec-17 5:24 
GeneralLounging in the Lounge... Pin
megaadam14-Dec-17 2:18
professionalmegaadam14-Dec-17 2:18 
GeneralRe: Lounging in the Lounge... Pin
H.Brydon15-Dec-17 16:24
professionalH.Brydon15-Dec-17 16:24 
GeneralMerging before checking into versioning system Pin
R. Erasmus13-Dec-17 19:49
R. Erasmus13-Dec-17 19:49 
GeneralRe: Merging before checking into versioning system Pin
megaadam14-Dec-17 2:27
professionalmegaadam14-Dec-17 2:27 
GeneralIs it just me? Pin
H.Brydon13-Dec-17 18:10
professionalH.Brydon13-Dec-17 18:10 
GeneralMissing Option Pin
Sanjay K. Gupta13-Dec-17 17:53
professionalSanjay K. Gupta13-Dec-17 17:53 
GeneralMy biggest productivity killer Pin
Steve Mayfield13-Dec-17 17:44
Steve Mayfield13-Dec-17 17:44 
GeneralOther: Many hats Pin
Nathan Minier13-Dec-17 2:03
professionalNathan Minier13-Dec-17 2:03 
GeneralAll except for Nuget and team Pin
den2k8812-Dec-17 21:03
professionalden2k8812-Dec-17 21:03 
GeneralTerrible project managers (or bosses) Pin
rriegel12-Dec-17 15:53
professionalrriegel12-Dec-17 15:53 
GeneralRe: Terrible project managers (or bosses) Pin
V.13-Dec-17 20:17
professionalV.13-Dec-17 20:17 
GeneralLousy Transport Pin
PeejayAdams12-Dec-17 3:36
PeejayAdams12-Dec-17 3:36 
GeneralMicrosoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Slow Eddie12-Dec-17 3:23
professionalSlow Eddie12-Dec-17 3:23 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Chris Losinger12-Dec-17 4:59
professionalChris Losinger12-Dec-17 4:59 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Slow Eddie12-Dec-17 6:51
professionalSlow Eddie12-Dec-17 6:51 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
den2k8815-Dec-17 4:38
professionalden2k8815-Dec-17 4:38 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
NotUnique12-Dec-17 12:15
professionalNotUnique12-Dec-17 12:15 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Member 1307923013-Dec-17 0:51
Member 1307923013-Dec-17 0:51 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Slow Eddie13-Dec-17 3:15
professionalSlow Eddie13-Dec-17 3:15 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
CodeWraith14-Dec-17 3:28
CodeWraith14-Dec-17 3:28 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
den2k8815-Dec-17 4:40
professionalden2k8815-Dec-17 4:40 
GeneralRe: Microsoft's constant churning of IDE's / OS's Pin
Richard Andrew x6417-Dec-17 5:28
professionalRichard Andrew x6417-Dec-17 5:28 
GeneralTime sucks Pin
agolddog12-Dec-17 3:17
agolddog12-Dec-17 3:17 
GeneralSearching for documentation Pin
kalberts12-Dec-17 0:27
kalberts12-Dec-17 0:27 
Engineers are NOT good writers. Period.

Usually the problem is lack of documentation; it simply isn't there.
When it is, it is frequently very poorly organized, as seen from a user's point of view:
Sometimes so 'structured' in an over-academic sense that until you have all the developer's abstractions into your head, it is impossible to guess where the concrete detail is found.
Sometimes, the engineer spends lots of time & space on explaining the last, super-fancy features, skipping everything about the fundamental mechanisms.
Sometimes, the documentation writer comes from some other environment, assuming that all readers share the same background so he can limit himself to the changes, say from Windows Forms to WPF.
Or, a printed book of 870 pages, neatly organized into 17 well defined chapter subjects - yet the author takes for granted that when you look up something on page 672, you have understood and memorized every single detail in the preceeding 671 pages.
Or, for online documentation, you are in a maze of twisting little passages, all alike, following links from the API to the class of the argument to the constructor to the class of the constructor alternativ list to a specific constructor to the enum definition to ...

Of course there are search functions. But we have had years of "my hit list is bigger than your hit list", so while fourteen million hits is bound to give a recall of very close to 100%, the precision is a small fraction of a percent. Actually, filtering functions were better ten years ago than they are today, but hit lists are magnitudes larger.

As long as you work only with a limited set high-fashion tools that you see in every project every day, and you need not know how things work, only how to invoke them, you can learn by heart most that you need. The problem lies in those things you use rarely, and neither time nor money allows you to go to a two week training course, yet you need to undertand it thoroughly. Then you may spend so much time with books and online searching that you may end up thinking that the two week training course might have been a good idea anyway, because documentation by itself is useless...

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