Everyone says developers have "hair on fire" problems.
I think that's wrong.
Developers are problem solvers. That's literally the job. When something breaks, they fix it. When a process is slow, they script it. When a tool sucks, they build an internal one.
That's what makes selling dev tools so hard. Your customer's default reaction to pain is to solve it themselves.
But there are problems that keep showing up. Not because devs can't solve them, but because they shouldn't have to (or don't want).
Here are the ones I heard the most after 120+ developer interviews:
1. Code review can't keep up. PRs pile up. The senior dev becomes the bottleneck. Everyone's waiting. Nobody's shipping.
2. Testing is still manual. The most mentioned problem in every interview. Teams shipping faster than ever, still testing like it's 2019. Click here, check that, hope nothing broke. Lucky for us at Bugster, this is still a huge pain.
3. Documentation gets outdated fast. Code moves faster than docs. Always has. Always will. The gap just keeps getting wider.
4. Requirements are unclear or change mid-feature. The spec says one thing Monday, another thing Wednesday. You build the feature, it's wrong. Not because of your code, because the target moved.
The thing these problems have in common is that that these are boring problems.
Nobody wakes up excited to write test cases, update docs, or chase down a spec change. Nobody builds a career on reviewing PRs faster.
Developers can solve them. They always can. But they don't want to.
Devs will automate the interesting stuff all day. But the boring stuff? It just sits there. Getting worse. Sprint after sprint.
That's the real "hair on fire" problem in dev teams. Not the hard problems. The boring ones that nobody wants to own.