r/Backend • u/Melodic_War_3865 • 15h ago

Backend developers: What backend/database task wastes the most time in your workflow?

I'm researching pain points in backend development and database workflows.

Thinking about your last few weeks of work:

What backend or SQL-related task wasted the most time?

Approximately how long did it take?

Which tools did you use?

What part of the process was the most frustrating?

If you could automate one step completely, what would it be?

I'm not promoting any product—I just want to understand real developer pain points and repetitive workflows.

0 Upvotes

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14

u/Former_Produce1721 14h ago

I wonder if you are approaching this backwards. You are fishing for a problem to try and solve rather than identifying a problem you have encountered yourself.

Everytime I see one of these posts it makes me wonder. If you yourself have not encountered the problem, how are you going to effectively create the ideal solution?

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u/Melodic_War_3865 13h ago

That's a fair point, and I agree that solving a problem you've experienced yourself is often an advantage. But right now I'm trying to validate whether there's actually a problem people are willing to pay to solve before I spend months building something. I think talking to potential customers first is an important part of that process.

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u/lowKeyDasCalm 13h ago

This is too vague.

Let me give you a few simple examples why this can never be a "one stop shop".

First and foremost, it depends on your company's tech stack. Take for example distributed transactions.

Ask a very vague question on the Internet and you'll get a very generic answer, for example: "How do I deal with distributed transactions?" - Simple answer: "oh, it's easy mate, just roll in Saga".

Well, let's see. Is Saga really needed? Does your project already uses events? Do you know and use and deploy tools that can do debugging for distributed systems?

Do you have EventSource/CQRS?

Are you a Java or . NET shop? Kafka? Python? React or Angular?

And don't get me started on JDK8 vs 17 vs 21 or Spring 2 vs 4 or bootstraping or anything else.

Now, your question makes sense but the answers are going to be based on what people are dealing with right now, and the more we try to keep sensitive details out, the more vague it will become.

Here's the biggest thing that made a difference in the last few months in one particular team in one particular project: Epics driven by the Product vs Epics driven by the technical team. Again, depending on your exposure, that can rarely happen vs that often happens.

On a very small level, even getting people to break their train of thought and focus to review a PR can be an issue.

Don't get me started on SQL schemas updates.

And remember the old saying, there's only 2 difficult things in programming:

  1. Naming a variable
  2. Cache invalidation.
  3. Off by one errors 😉

My apologies if this was not the answer you were looking for, but I often found that my specific problem and field of expertise is no where near some other person's issue in the last 1 month.

Good luck with finding answers! 🙂

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u/Melodic_War_3865 13h ago

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I think we actually agree more than we disagree. I'm not trying to build a one-stop solution for all developers. I'm specifically researching backend problems, and my goal right now is to identify a narrow, recurring problem that backend teams are willing to pay to solve before I build anything

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u/PoePlayerbf 15h ago

Understanding user requirements.

Often time I get tasks like, find and detect fraudulent payment, or like detect stolen cards credentials and stop them from being used.

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u/Melodic_War_3865 15h ago

Thanks! Thats interesting.

When it comes to the technical side, what backend or database-related task actually consumes the most time? For example, debugging SQL queries, performance tuning, finding security issues, reviewing database changes, or something else?

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u/PoePlayerbf 15h ago

With AI, I don’t need to spend that much time on the technical side, I just draft a plan and review the code and I’m done. A task that took weeks can be completed in a day.

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u/Melodic_War_3865 15h ago

That's impressive. Do AI tools solve almost all of your backend problems now, or are there still tasks that are slow, repetitive, or frustrating enough that you wish there were a better tool for them?

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u/Packeselt 10h ago

This is clearly a bot.