I’m one of the few developers who’s not burnt out from workload, but my job makes up for it with inefficient processes. After opening our massive monolithic solution in the IDE, it can take several minutes to load enough to get even syntax highlighting let alone feedback from the compiler. Building the solution after making changes takes another several minutes, especially if I’m unlucky enough to need to modify a project that a lot of other projects depend on. After a new build, the app that runs locally will take several minutes to refresh to be usable with the new changes. I’m working on software that generates Word documents and that process takes another several minutes. Between making a change and seeing results from that change, I need to wait at least five minutes, often longer. The cherry on top is that most of the changes consist of adding or removing a small amount of markup in .NET’s ancient .ascx markup generator files.

As one of my coworkers put it, “It’s like watching paint dry, then cleaning a toilet with a toothbrush.”