guardMilin Desai, CEO, explains how companies that digitally transform themselves often deliver quality customer experiences.
If there’s one constant for developer teams lately, it’s that they’re under pressure to do more with less. Developers are the main drivers of innovation, and companies need to understand what makes their developers most productive and efficient so they can do their job effectively.
At Sentry, we believe that developer productivity is tied to developer happiness, and we have the data to back it up. We partnered with SlashData to survey over 1,000 developers to find out what inspires them, what they’re proud of, what they enjoy doing most, and what makes them Hinders productivity.
One big learning is that happier developers require less time to complete common development tasks. We ran a regression analysis on data from three common tasks and found that a developer who is 10% happier than another developer will need 10% less time to complete the same task.
The key to developer happiness
So what makes developers happier? In general, developers want to be left to do the work you hired them to do: innovating, creating new features and products, and shipping code. What they don’t like is getting bogged down in tools and processes that disrupt their focus. For example, when asked about their ideal schedule, developers wished they could spend 19% less time engaging with internal messaging and processes.
Not surprisingly, the activity that fills developers with pride is writing good code. Overall, 69% of developers said they are proud of good code – the top response. Perhaps surprisingly, developers take the same level of pride in fixing bugs and improving app performance, with 65% of them citing each activity as a source of pride.
Developers at larger companies are less productive
Along with happiness, company size also affects productivity. Our survey found that for every additional 500 employees in a company, the developers working there were, on average, 1% less productive. This makes sense, given that the two biggest barriers cited to reduced efficiency were internal processes and bureaucracy – both of which are big factors in larger organizations.
One takeaway for enterprises is that they should continuously improve developer workflows as much as possible. Larger teams are harder to coordinate, and some companies try to compensate for this with more meetings, status updates, and internal reporting. But more than a quarter of developers responding to our survey said meetings and other internal processes are keeping them away from their work.
Correct tooling is important
Focusing on the right tooling is a better way to increase productivity than adding meetings. Our survey found that a decentralized approach to supporting the people you’re serving can increase productivity and efficiency, meaning companies should trust their developers to choose the tools they need for the job and Don’t feel forced to tie into SRE/OPS/IT tooling.
For example, developers at larger enterprises were more likely to say that their workflow was disrupted due to the inability to identify the owner of an issue. This included not having a clear list of issues to prioritize and not being able to identify the impact of an issue on end users. For debugging, not being able to identify the owner of a section of code was a hindrance to productivity.
All of these issues can be addressed by allowing developers to select the right tools needed for the job, allowing them to quickly identify the source of a problem, determine its owner, and prioritize what needs to be fixed. Should be found.
Our survey also sheds light on many other aspects of developers’ work. When asked about programming challenges, 37% of developers reported that the biggest problems they faced were rooted in rushed deadlines. The second and third most commonly cited challenges were cleaning up legacy code (33%) and tackling problems with unused code (32%).
It’s clear that developer productivity is closely related to developer happiness. Organizations should strive to streamline workflows and processes, reduce meeting time, and allow developers to choose the right tools needed for the job. This way, your developers will be the happiest and most efficient – and best at delivering the products that drive your business forward.
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