为什么开发者每周因效率低下而损失一天？_AI阅读总结 — 包阅AI

The author has worked for DX as a contractor.

Sixty-nine percent of developers lose at least eight hours a week — one working day per week — to largely fixable inefficiencies, according to a new survey.

What’s standing in their way? Their own managers.

The report on developer experience (DevEx), released Monday by Atlassian and DX, found a yawning gulf between what developers and IT managers think has the most impact on developer productivity and job satisfaction.

Researchers interviewed about 2,150 IT managers and developers. It seems quite clear that managers are making decisions about developer experience without asking their developers.

That’s a risk to code and company stability. In fact, nearly two-thirds of developers at least consider leaving their jobs when they are dissatisfied with the developer experience.

And there’s urgency in getting things right: 76% of organizations surveyed said they plan to invest more in DevEx within the year. But without the proper measurements and developer feedback, it will all be a waste.

The New Stack talked to Andrew Boyagi, head of DevOps evangelism at Atlassian, a collaboration software company, about this great divide and how to get actionable feedback and measurements where it matters most.

What Developers Really Want

“Everyone agrees that developer experience is important, but it’s clear that developers are not empowered,” Boyagi said. The survey results, he added, make it “clear that they’re not empowered, and they don’t have what they need to do their best work. But there is a massive difference in the opinions of those two groups on why they’re not empowered.”

Indeed, both the devs and their managers agree that developer experience is important and key to retention, with 63% of developers responding that it’s an important or very important factor that determines whether they stay at their current role.

Yet, while 86% of tech leaders believe that improving DevEx is crucial to attracting and retaining the best tech talent, less than half of developers think their organizations actually make it a priority.

An apparent chasm has formed between how developers experience their day-to-day and what managers are focusing on.

Only 44% of devs surveyed by Atlassian and DX thought their leaders would even be aware of the inefficiencies that cause them to lose eight hours a week of productivity, while only 23% of them thought there was enough effort put toward improvements.

Technical debt, poor documentation and insufficient time for deep work were among the biggest spoilers of DevEx, the report found. Developers responded that the majority of these eight hours lost is due to the following:

This tracks with other inefficiency numbers reported in other surveys, like how technical debt cuts the cost of innovation. Google’s 2023 State of DevOps Report (DORA) echoes this importance of internal documentation, finding that quality docs can have a 12.8 times impact on performance.

This is underscored by the StackOverflow 2023 Developer Survey’s results that found almost all developers spend at least half an hour a day searching for answers, like who owns what.

What Managers Think Devs Want

Not much of this rings a bell for IT managers.

According to the survey results, engineering leadership thinks the top causes of complexity in the day-to-day life of a developer are:

“There’s nothing sinister happening here,” Boyagi said. “The leaders want to empower their devs to be happy, to be productive. But when they don’t understand how to do that, it’s a huge problem.”

And it’s one that triggers high turnover: “There’s a cost in hiring and onboarding new engineers. But also, when you think about the huge productivity hit across that staff who don’t leave because they’re carrying the load while those people leave, it further reduces developer satisfaction.”

Adding to that, he continued, is the loss of institutional knowledge from those developers who best understand the code and its context in a way that amplifies others’ productivity.

“It’s really important that leaders actually understand what are the challenges that their teams are having,” he said, “and they prioritize fixing those things.”

For example, the majority of developers look at technical debt as the top trigger of frustration and inefficiency, but that doesn’t even seem to be on management’s radar. If tech debt doesn’t surface as a priority, then the top-down pressure to continue releasing features will continue, and time will not be given to pay down that debt through refactoring and migrations.

Just because understaffing didn’t make the Dev Top Five, doesn’t mean that it isn’t also hurting developer productivity. But, Boyagi said, “When you are thinking about a limited investment budget to improve developer experience, you want to make sure that you’re moving that investment towards the thing that’s going to have the most impact.”

Over the last couple years, a huge chunk of that investment in developer experience is funneled to platform engineering and generative AI.

Developers Aren’t Feeling the AI Wins

This gap between management perception and development reality widens when you ask about AI.

The Atlassian-DX State of DevEx Survey found that leaders believe that AI is the most effective way to improve developer productivity and satisfaction — while a whopping two-thirds of developers have yet to see any significant AI productivity gains.

“I’ve spoken to leaders who are going all-in on AI,” Boyagi said. “They’re saying most of their budget for developer experience is going into AI, which could be a good thing if it’s solving the problems that they have.

“But again, this misalignment can lead to people investing in the wrong areas, and, even through the best of intention, not actually improving the experience for the developers they have in their organization.”

It’s not that developers don’t want this effort. It’s just that, again, the effort has nothing to do with their experience.

Part of the problem is that so much of developer AI right now is about generating code — the thing developers want to spend more time doing, not less. In fact, a common developer complaint is that they don’t get to spend enough time coding.

According to many resources, including the Global Code Time Report, on average, developers spend less than two hours a day coding. In fact, studies have shown that a good day for developers is defined by more time spent coding.

A chef wants someone to cut the monotony by chopping their vegetables and washing their dishes. They don’t want a Ninja blender that’s going to take away the joy of cooking. Boyagi compares this to a developer who wants AI to write documentationin order to increase — not take away — the time spent on their joy of writing code.

Similarly, while technical debt tops the developer complaint list, devs don’t want to spend time paying it down. GenAI already has interesting applications in explaining complex code bases, assisting in cloud migrations and highlighting refactoring priorities.

AI productivity gains are unlocked when applied to the more boring and frustrating developer work, which isn’t writing code.

For both platform engineering and generative AI, making decisions on behalf of your devs — instead of treating them like customers, running demos and pilots, and asking for a lot of feedback — is a recipe for failure. This is probably why both are now sitting in Gartner’s trough of disillusionment, while developer enablement remains a priority.

Popular False Proxies for Productivity

If engineering is a science, then it should be taken for granted that you cannot improve what you don’t measure.

“We found that investing in understanding and improving developer experience is a virtuous cycle,” Boyagi said.

Right now, the factors organizations are using to measure developer productivity are very hit or miss:

One of the major criticisms of McKinsey’s developer productivity framework is that it contends that productivity measures are meant to incentivize developers to code more. Putting emphasis on lines of code written and story points are both easily gamified and rarely lead to quality.

Another popular criticism of AI code generator tools is that they suggest pieces of code based on what is most likely to be accepted, not what is the most efficient line of code within the context of the maintainability of the overall codebase.

GenAI has so far only served to increase the lines of code written, while potentially decreasing the quality and security of that code. This leaves devs unimpressed.

“When you put devs at the center of what you’re doing, then companies get what they want. Essentially, companies want higher quality software faster. Developers also want the same thing, but they want to do it in a pleasurable way. So by improving developer experience and investing in the right areas, everyone actually gets the outcome that they want.”

— Andrew Boyagi, Atlassian

More lines of code also quickly translate to the cause of most developer inefficiencies: more technical debt.

Change failure rate and deployment frequency are half of the favorite Google DORA metrics, joined by lead time and failed deployment recovery time. While DORA has become an industry benchmark, it doesn’t actually measure developer experience but rather organizational efficiency — however, while it can spotlight frustrations your developers are feeling, you still have to ask them about it.

Perhaps the most jarring result from the survey is that 38% of organizations are measuring hours worked as a proxy for developer productivity, which stands in contrast to the 69% of developers who have said they are wasting at least a fifth of each day due to inefficiencies. Hours worked may be a red flag for developer frustration and burnout, but can actually be a sign of a lack of productivity.

Engineers are creative workers — which means, according to some research, that they can only do their best work for about four hours a day. (In a TNS VoxPop survey conducted in December, nearly half of participants said three to five hours a day was the most they could code at their best.) More hours of work does not translate to more productivity.

What To Ask Your Developers

Unsurprisingly, using the wrong measurements leads to the wrong assumptions.

The Atlassian-DX report found that the top things leaders believe will improve developer productivity and satisfaction are:

“The misalignment between engineers and their leaders is probably the leading cause of a poor developer experience, and, as a result, poor productivity,” Boyagi said. “The best solution is the easiest one, and that is to speak to developers [to] understand their challenges.”

Listening to developers and creating an environment where everyone feels safe to speak up is vital to closing the chasm between what devs need and what managers think.

Laura Tacho, CTO of the DX developer insights platform, posted this month on LinkedIn: “If I started a new CTO or VP role tomorrow, one of the first things I’d do is encourage a bit of productive complaining. Complaining means they care, and I take no complaining as a sign that people feel it’s not worthwhile, or it’s unsafe, to share their opinion.”

The first step is asking your developers what needs to be improved.

The Atlassian-DX report recommends getting started by focusing on three areas:

• Developer sentiment: Evaluate this through developer experience surveys.
• Workflows and processes: Ask developers what areas cause them the most friction, and start tracking and measuring those areas. Then, implement and measure changes that impact them.
• Key performance indicators: These can be somewhat qualitative, including perceived productivity and ease of delivering software, as well as developer satisfaction.

“There’s a correlation between understanding of challenges and investment in those challenges, and then we see satisfaction and productivity improve,” Boyagi said, which is why the DX developer insights measurement platform was embedded into Atlassian’s DevEx platform Compass.

“When you put devs at the center of what you’re doing, then companies get what they want. Essentially, companies want higher quality software faster. Developers also want the same thing, but they want to do it in a pleasurable way,” he continued. “So by improving developer experience and investing in the right areas, everyone actually gets the outcome that they want.”

Correction: This article has been corrected from a previous version to indicate that 69% of developers surveyed lose at least eight hours a week to inefficiencies.