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Geoff Stevens
Geoff Stevens

Posted on • Originally published at software.com

Is developer productivity a bigger constraint to innovation than capital?

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.
The developer work week

Reproduced from Stripe's The Developer Coefficient

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)

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drbearhands profile image
DrBearhands

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:

new technology trends, like AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain.

These are indeed trends, but not really innovative in a useful way.

  • Data science (the branch of AI enterprise tends to care about) is useless to many companies. The current hype in particular was started by projects using dataset and compute power not available to most companies. It's probably the least overrated of the list - of course it is, it's an entire academic field and has been for some time - but it's still completely misused more often than not.
  • IoT assumes connecting your appliances to the internet is a good idea in and of itself. I simply cannot comprehend this.
  • Blockchains have a 0% success rate. This is not by chance, as they are pareto-dominated by other tech for any legal purpose in western countries.

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).