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8 ways to retain top developer talent
Establishing an explicit focus on managing the health of DX and providing a way for those involved with DX to interface with the business will greatly contribute to the overall success of your DX efforts.
5. Don’t push developers to fail their second audience
Developers create software for two audiences: users and developers — that is, those developers who will work on the product. For users, product excellence is critical. But for developers, excellence inside the product is extremely important as well, and that has big implications for the business using the software. In this sense, DX is an indication of code quality, which says everything about the viability of software.
Here, the importance to the business is two-fold. First, systems with good DX are easier to maintain and extend, with software quality a key differentiator between code that can grow and evolve and code that is doomed to degrade and decay. Second, when DX is high, developers — especially senior ones — are more likely to be satisfied with working on the project. Because of this, the importance of code quality shows why project velocity is not a metric to be seen in isolation as it often is.
As the human experience of working on projects, DX is the most indicative characteristic of a project’s health. How it feels to work in the internals of a project is affected by everything from tooling to meeting tempo, and whether that feels pleasant or unpleasant says everything about how well things are going, how they will proceed, and whether people will want to continue working on it.
6. Provide opportunities to learn, teach, share
Learning, teaching, and sharing are major incentives for developers. And the more accomplished, passionate, and caring the developer, the more they typically matter. The ability to craft DX and help others see its value is essential. By inculcating a culture where everyone is participating in a larger journey that includes sharing, everyone finds a deeper well of inspiration.
Incorporating contribution to open-source projects is a great way to accomplish this. Many software-oriented businesses include an open-source component for good reason. It allows developers to express their creations, pulls in contributions from the wider world, and draws friendly attention to what’s being done in the organization.
Every developer’s experience is lifted up when their work feels a part of something greater.
7. Mitigate DX-killing red tape
The business longs for metrics and insights into what’s happening in the dark interior of software creation. But too much intrusion into developer workflow is a real DX killer. Instead, minimize unnecessary meetings and reporting, and keep an eye on what works most efficiently. Even just the sense that leadership is incorporating this factor into their strategizing will help.
The best software developers thrive in an environment where they can focus on what they do best — building software — and spend most of their time on activities that feel valuable. They have honed and invested in what they are good at, and they want to spend as much time as possible on those tasks.
Reducing friction between teams and areas of ownership is also important. IT leaders are in the position to help break down silos of ownership and exclusivity.
8. Automate (and de-stress) delivery
Recent research shows that 7 in 10 developers quit projects because of stress over delivery. A million and one things go into the detailed activity of building software and when it is all bundled up into a single discrete thing that is to be delivered without problems, it’s very stressful. There is a sense of never really doing enough, despite your best efforts.
The best way to address that is to build reliable automated systems. Continuous integration and delivery, automated testing and the like are becoming standard, must-have parts of dev processes these days, but they are only part of the story. A culture of support is just as necessary. How developers feel treated in their times of difficulty and uncertainty has a huge impact on DX. If successful organizations maintain a two-way street between business and IT, DX is the condition of the road.
