Are more developers burning out? Or am I just seeing things.

The art thing is the secret all of us who've been doing this long enough have learned to accept silently: you can't tell management that there's simply no quantifying metrics that will indicate a piece of software is good, because it's inherently qualitative, you can't measure a good bit of code with numbers any more than you can measure Picasso's works numerically to identify it as good.

Just like art, sadly it's all lagging indicators: good art is recognized only after its creation, and it's the artist you must recognize made it good - not some specific reproducible technique. It's that artist. Management never of course wishes to hear that, they want everything to be good by direct reproducible application of approaches. They can get part way there, but the real stinker they refuse to accept?

Good software is only recognizable by lagging indicators after it's made. That's just the fact that so much of our industry fights not to accept, wanting predictive indicators but sorry. The predictive indicator is the quality of your artists, the lagging indicators need to be watched more:

• Defect rates
• Functioning software
• Time to recover
• Time to repair
• Time to enhance

Tons of garbage software with all the latest greatest approaches used in their creation are garbage art, they work and have no defects but take a year to repair or enhance because the artist didn't have the qualitative vision.

Are more developers burning out? Or am I just seeing things.