Developer Experience: It’s Time to Start Complaining

It's time to make noise. Developers need to take back their happiness and their productivity. But where should they start?

On this week's episode of Dev Interrupted, we're joined by Justin Reock, Field CTO and Chief Evangelist at Gradle. With a mission to mitigate the toil, friction, and frustration felt by so many developers, Justin has become a tireless advocate of Developer Productivity Engineering. 

Listen as Justin explains DPE by exploring the connections between productivity, developer experience, and joy. 

Episode Highlights

• (3:50) What is Developer Productivity Engineering?
• (8:14) Creative vs. destructive flow
• (16:21) Metrics and visibility
• (22:37) Open-source supply chain security
• (24:01) Blockchain, AR, and VR

Episode Excerpts

How Facebook, Netflix, and LinkedIn handle developer productivity engineering

Justin: That's one of the things that actually differentiate DPE from DevOps a little bit is that there's the human factor, right? Like the platonic ideal of a DevOps team is supposed to be not a team at all, right? 100% automation, no humans in the loop, right? But with developer productivity, you have to have humans cascading this practice, caring about, you know, the metrics that they see on the dashboard and then correlating that to developer experience. Without that empathy, then you don't get the focus; you don't get anything actionable that really changes the culture of the business. So that is a differentiator is that you need those people to be thinking about these problems. But then you know that that ends up, and ideally, these people have written code, right? I mean, right? It's very special you come across these developers who, like, truly care more about the performance of their team. And what the whole team is, is going through in terms of the developer experience versus their own experience writing code, and they're everywhere. They're in every organization. I mean, that's the thing is, like, a lot of folks have already been doing DPE. They just haven't been calling it that, you know, or maybe it's a part-time, couple hours a week that some development leads spends on productivity. But what we have to see now is a shift in focus to making this a center of excellence. The companies that are really doing this, right, you know, the Facebooks, the LinkedIns, the Netflix, you know, they have dedicated teams of hundreds, productivity engineers, it's 1,000s of developers. And that's the only way, I think, to kind of keep enough of a focus in the industry to allow this to be a transformative change as opposed to just minor tweaks.

Do CEOs Care About Developer Experience?

Justin: I'm a big fan of the whole Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours for expertise type of thing, but is it 10,000 hours waiting on a bill to complete, or is it 10,000 hours writing code? So obviously, if you're able to spend more time on that part of your learning and your experience, that only makes sense that you'd be able to onboard faster. You won't run screaming from the industry because you're like, oh, this is not what I signed up for. This sucks. So, I think that I mean, there's all these impacts, and the time is right for it now. I mean, Gartner released a CEO report a couple of months ago, the 2022 CEO report, and it was like, I don't remember the exact statistic, but it's like a 40% increase in terms of CEOs that are now... That they actually have Developer Experience on their radar, which is very good, but also very acute, right? I mean, just a couple of years ago, it was way low on the list of CEO concerns, and now it's one of the top concerns.

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