Exploring Self-Care, Anxiety, Depression, and the Gender Gap in the Software Engineering Pipeline

Software engineers may experience burnout, which is often caused by the anxieties and stresses of the workplace. Understanding the well-being and resilience practices of software engineers and evaluating their knowledge of mental health is one factor to understand our current, diverse, multi-generational workplaces. Here, we present preliminary results of a study examining the self-care practices of software engineers, a general overview of the state of mental health of software engineers, and correlations between expressions of mental health and demographic factors. Among 224 respondents, positive correlations between imposter syndrome and happiness, anxiety, and depression were identified. We also identified negative correlations between mental health literacy and imposter syndrome, happiness, anxiety, and depression. Well-being had a positive correlation with self-efficacy, as well as with happiness. We also present the Gender Gap in mental health and our findings in relation to that construct. Our findings suggest increasing mental health support services.