I recently read a report that Stripe released called The Developer Coefficient that asked both C-level executives and developers to identify the largest constraints to innovation. One of the main the takeaways that I came across is that executives worry more about finding skilled developers than they do capital, with 53% identifying access to software talent as a major constraint and 52% identifying capital.
If you dig a little deeper, there are some other interesting takeaways in the article.
Access to software talent isn’t the only problem. Both management and developers see huge gains to be made in productivity:
- 96%: the number of C-level executives that believe increasing developer productivity is high or medium priority.
- 68.4%: how productive on average developers believe they are as a whole, 100% being perfectly productive.
Per the report, “developers [are] force-multipliers: It’s not how many devs companies have; it’s how they’re being leveraged.”
I think many companies have incorrectly attributed their technology woes to a lack of developer talent.
The average developer spends 17.3 hours each week dealing with technical debt, bad code, and maintenance jobs, like debugging and refactoring. That’s a 31.6% efficiency impact that equates to an estimated nearly $300B loss in global annual GDP, which is equivalent to the entire GDP of Pakistan.
Despite the efficiency impact, roughly 83% of C-level executives and 77% of developers are very or somewhat confident they have sufficient resources to keep up with new technology trends, like AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain.
And yet a whopping 44% of developers believe their company is too slow to react to tech trends.
Something doesn’t quite add up. Maybe companies need to innovate and react faster to new technology trends.
What do you think? Is software talent the biggest constraint to innovation?
Top comments (1)
I'm going to sound rather rambling on this one, sorry for that. My insufficiently backed opinion:
No, hype and incompetence are the biggest constraint to innovation. Your post gives a good illustration of the problem:
These are indeed trends, but not really innovative in a useful way.
In addition, how is using these technologies "innovative" when they are so ubiquitous?
The people who have to allocate resources (primarily managers without deep technical backgrounds I'm assuming), cannot tell hype words from innovation and want to buy innovation rather than drive it. Innovation is imposed top-down rather than being explored bottom-up.
Another situation where this occurred is when "agile" started being capitalized. New devs buy into the bullshit and bad practices become dogma.
There's other problems, of course, like preferring iterative improvements over drastic ones (e.g. why we still use x86 and FP isn't more popular).