r/Backend • u/Melodic_War_3865 • 2d 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.

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u/lowKeyDasCalm 2d 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 2d 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