
The Developer Coefficient: a $300B opportunity for businesses - johns
https://stripe.com/reports/developer-coefficient-2018#hn
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dv_dt
It's interesting to put some questions and answers into contrast beside one
another.

Asked of C level execs:

"How much of an impact can developers have to help your company with each of
the following challenges?"

Top answer (71%) Bringing products to market faster

"How much of a priority is it for upper management to increase the
productivity of its developers?"

Ans: High priority (96%)

Later, asked of developers:

"How many hours per week do you estimate developers at your company waste on
maintenance (i.e. dealing with bad code / errors, debugging, refactoring,
modifying)?"

Ans 17.3 hrs (of 41 hrs)...

Similar question on time spent on tech debt & bad code:

13.5 hrs spent on tech debt 3.8 hrs on "bad code" (this seems low in light of
the above numbers).

The use of the word "waste" for maintenance work is interesting too. Perhaps
if taken in a lean/manufacturing sense it's ok, but in a development process
treating that as "waste" might lead one to think that's why the development
speed is so slow in the first place. I would also note, unless you're building
green field software, all the work is by definition "maintenance" because in
the best case you'd be modifying old software to add new capabilities...

Not sure what conclusions Stripe is making here that is an "opportunity" for
business. I would suspect the best advice is go slow to go fast (slow down
development to be methodical in order to go faster systematically).

