A colleague of mine, Naiyarah, just pointed me towards a report was just published about the happiness of developers around the globe. It is a very comprehensive report and looks at various breakdowns of developers happiness.
Much of the initial part follows the World Happiness Report and talks of things like work/life balance, healthcare, safety, political stability, etc.
But the latter half of the report then dives deep into the lives of developers specifically and looks at autonomy, tooling, workplaces, etc.
It was interesting to see that the particular lump of world I happen to be on, the UK, has the highest rating of happiness with respect to online communities.
And that got me thinking... as a developer advocate, my job is to help developers to learn about, access, and utilise technology. To build community. To listen to developers and their experiences and feed that back to the product teams.
But what contributes to happiness? What things can developer advocates, or developer relations people do specifically to help improve developers happiness?
Comment below if you have any specific ideas.
For starters, I think we can utilize the "advocacy" in our job titles :) Meaning looking at what stresses or confuses developers about our products and advocating for a change. From numerous interviews with developers, I know for instance that they often worry about breaking the production environment, often their expectations are set incorrectly, and they ask themselves questions such as "What does this button do?", "What does this method do?", or "Can I go back after I click it/call it?"