Garden’s Report Shows the Impact of ‘Lost Time’ on the Bottom Line and Job Satisfaction Among Critical Tech Employees
New research released today from Garden reveals that developers and DevOps professionals spend over 15 hours on tasks which many consider to be frustrating like debugging pipelines, and waiting for tests and builds—amounting to 39% of a 40 hour work week, derailing company innovation cycles and their ability to compete. Available for download, the company’s report “In Search of Lost Time: Developer Productivity in the Cloud Native Era” quantifies the likely cost to businesses as up to a staggering $61 billion per year in the U.S. alone, based on median pay and number of software developer jobs as reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Recommended ITech News: Entrust nShield HSMs Now Support Microsoft Double Key Encryption
“We see it happening all the time—individual developers waste hours or even full days every week solving the same old problems in isolation, and many assume that’s just the way it has to be,” said Jon Edvald, CEO and co-founder of Garden. “We’ve lived this scenario, and our survey spotlights the heavy fiscal and emotional impact this is having on companies and their tech teams across the board. Developers are already under immense pressure to build and ship faster. As applications get more complex and distributed, tech teams need to ensure their workflows and tools are keeping pace, and that they do not allow this ‘productivity debt’ to spiral out of control.”
Lost Time on Tedious Tasks Slows Innovation and Ability to do Strategic Work
More than seven in 10 (76%) of respondents say the time they spend on specific tasks—like the provisioning and management of dev/testing environments and creating, updating and maintaining Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines—is time wasted and could be put to more strategic use.
-
49% of these respondents say they would spend this time developing new products and services to support the company
-
46% would improve speed and delivery of existing products and services
-
44% would improve security for existing products and services
Recommended ITech News: Oracle Speeds Cloud Migration with New Oracle Cloud Lift Services
On average, respondents spend more than 15 hours every week on tasks outside of writing application code or tests, including:
-
Writing and maintaining internal tooling (3.2 hours/week)
-
Setting up, maintaining and debugging pipelines/automation (3.2 hours/week)
-
Waiting for pipelines (i.e. Continuous Integration (CI)) to run (2.6 hours/week)
-
Waiting for builds and tests (outside of Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines) (3.1 hours/week)
-
Setting up dev environments (3.5 hours/week)
Respondents at organizations not yet using Kubernetes spend an average 14.3 hours per week on these tasks, as compared with 16.5 hours a week for those who are already using Kubernetes, which spotlights the hidden productivity debt that may occur when organizations adopt new technologies.
Recommended ITech News: Cloudera Data Platform Available on Google Cloud
Frustration in DevOps and Development Teams
Most respondents face frustrations in their job, with common causes relating to both organization structure and processes, and the development process itself. The top three frustration-inducing tasks are:
-
Waiting for pipelines to run (76%)
-
Waiting for builds and tests (74%)
-
Setting up, maintaining and debugging pipelines/automation (71%)
In fact, only 11% of all respondents are completely happy with their development setups and workflows and think they’re operating as well as they could be —and only 2% of non-managers are completely happy with their development setups. Non-managers are nearly twice as likely as managers to say there’s “noticeable room for improvement” in their development setups and workflows.
The combination of frustrations and low happiness with tools and workflows will likely impact overall job satisfaction for in-demand talent, making it harder for organizations to retain key employees.
Recommended ITech News: Giving Customers Choice to Buy How They Want: Cisco Bridges to as-a-Service with Cisco Plus
Kubernetes Usage and Challenges
The survey found almost universal enterprise adoption of Kubernetes: 62% of organizations are already using Kubernetes, and 31% are currently trying it out or evaluating the technology. Only 3% of organizations aren’t using any container orchestration tools at all. But as technologies like Kubernetes—and the complexity they entail—become more closely intertwined with application development, developers are being increasingly pulled into operational work outside of their area of expertise. Ninety-five percent of organizations using Kubernetes have faced challenges after rolling it out. Among the most common of these ”day two” challenges are training and onboarding (37%) or complexity of setup/configuration (35%).
Funding the Promise of DevOps
There is still a long way to go before enterprises can reach DevOps nirvana, that magical place where developers no longer waste hours every week on low-value work and development workflows are free of frustration. Therefore it comes as no surprise that 83% percent of organizations are planning to hire more staff or increase their use of freelancers/outsourcing into DevOps roles in 2021, and 75% of respondents say their DevOps budgets have increased or will increase compared to 2020. COVID-19 has led to an increase in tool use in almost all organizations (95%) with 43% increasing their use of remote development tools.
Recommended ITech News: Cyber Risk Aware Joins the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (Misa) to Deliver Real-Time Security Awareness Training and Behaviour Change
