Jyoti Bansal is Co-Founder and CEO of API security company Traceable.
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As industries such as airline, tech and retail (among others) aggressively trim expenses, few sectors have been immune to layoffs recently. But almost entirely overlooked in this race to economize is an expense few CEOs have considered: developer inefficiency.
Software developers now lie at the heart of companies of all sizes, but their hands are tied by outdated tools and processes. In the aggregate, inefficiency in software development represents a multi-trillion-dollar problem.
In this tight economy, developer experience will enter the spotlight as more companies seek recession-era efficiencies. As a developer, founder and CEO of three high-growth tech companies, I’ve seen the astronomical savings companies can realize when they prioritize developer experience, and maximizing developer efficiency can even help avoid layoffs altogether.
Seizing A Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
There are 24.3 million active software developers worldwide, according to Developer Nation. In the U.S. alone, the aggregate developer payroll exceeds $165 billion per year.
But most software engineers spend half their workday on what’s known as toil—tedious, repetitive tasks like testing and shipping code or waiting for approvals. It’s like throwing a dollar in the trash for every dollar spent on dev.
By cutting toil through automation and process improvements, companies can redirect precious resources away from low-value, repetitive work to high-value development. Here are five major changes in the pipeline as companies seek to refocus developer efforts and budgets.
1. Internal developer platforms are proliferating.
For all the cutting-edge tools software engineers create for other industries, tools to lighten their own workload have been scarce. Dev teams spend far too much time maintaining ad hoc toolsets and far too little time doing their core job—building code.
This year we’ll see improved internal developer platforms (IDPs) rise to fill this productivity gap. In simplified terms, think of this as the difference between DOS and Windows. Instead of laboriously creating environments, good IDPs give developers a premade set of tools, processes and services. These platforms will be newly relevant as companies look to cut costs, and they’ll also become more robust and turnkey.
2. More companies will demand measurability and metrics.
In my experience, I’ve come to find that many companies employing thousands of developers haven’t been tracking key development metrics. That will change moving forward as they work to identify and eliminate bottlenecks and resource gaps.
Considering how many software platforms are dedicated to tracking KPIs for other roles, like sales and marketing, the “black box” surrounding developer performance is a problem begging to be solved. By tracking dev metrics and using value stream mapping to analyze, design and manage the flow of materials and information, companies can help engineering teams run more efficiently.
Table stakes metrics include those defined by DevOps research and assessment: deployment frequency, lead time, mean-time-to-recovery and failure change rate. A better handle on these critical stats can enable companies to see where time (and money) is spent.
3. Cloud costs are getting scrutinized.
For many tech companies, cloud costs can be highly impactful—in some cases, they are second only to the cost of human capital.
Take SNAP, the company behind Snapchat. As of 2021, the company generated about $4 billion in annual revenue but spent nearly $1.75 billion on the cost of cloud infrastructure, according to one analysis. That’s more than 40% of the money coming in.
Several factors make it difficult to predict or control cloud costs, including decentralization, developer over-provisioning, manual processes and a lack of precise cost-goals alignment. Because of this, expect companies to embrace FinOps—an increased collaboration between engineering and business teams—during this tight economy.
In FinOps, finance, IT and DevOps work together to understand significant cost drivers better, set cost goals and targets and create engineering discipline to align cloud infra consumption to these goals.
The latest platforms facilitate these fruitful collaborations by automating cost management and offering continuous monitoring, among other tools.
4. Security and governance are shifting left.
As budgets tighten, security will become everyone’s responsibility. Expect more companies to adopt DevSecOps (development, security and operations) mindsets that make security an integrated part of the software delivery lifecycle, starting all the way “left” with the code build and test process.
Many current implementations silo DevSecOps on the far “right” of the software development life cycle, creating inherent inefficiency around security, putting deployment velocity at odds with delivering secure applications and tension between teams tasked with each goal.
With security incidents skyrocketing (financial sector data compromises nearly doubled between 2020 and 2021, while manufacturing data breaches tripled), more companies will integrate security and governance into developer processes.
Rather than testing and securing fully formed software, more teams will integrate threat modeling into development and incorporate security tests from the very start.
5. GitOps and automation are increasing productivity.
AI and machine learning have transformed how we do everything, from investing our money to shopping online. As companies take a harder look at expenses, we’ll finally see this functionality fully woven into every phase of the development process. Expect to see companies make greater use of machine learning and AI across a broad spectrum of activities to reduce developer toil and increase productivity.
Until now, routine tasks like validation have taken hours, if not days. Automation can empower developers to deliver software faster with greater visibility and control. Increasingly, companies will use products that deliver fully managed GitOps experiences, automatically detecting bad deployments, propagating changes across multiple environments and other tasks.
Conclusion
Developer experience is a relatively new idea for many businesses, including household names in travel, finance, retail and tech. During this downturn, that will likely change.
In the face of economic headwinds, we can expect significant leaps in developer efficiency and experience as more members of the C-suite understand just how much money they’ve been leaving on the table.
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