Kurt Mackey

Makes it harder to be productive.

Makes it harder to be productive.

Yeah, when it's not getting better. I mean, it's demoralizing for developers. It's also demoralizing for leaders I talk to who run, are getting this type of data at their companies and quarter after quarter, despite making efforts to make improvements around this stuff, the data keeps coming back that things are slow. People are frustrated. It's hard to get work done.

Yeah, when it's not getting better. I mean, it's demoralizing for developers. It's also demoralizing for leaders I talk to who run, are getting this type of data at their companies and quarter after quarter, despite making efforts to make improvements around this stuff, the data keeps coming back that things are slow. People are frustrated. It's hard to get work done.

At GitHub, I think I told this story to you before, Adam. Tell it again. At GitHub, we had a lot of these problems. Developer tooling, getting releases out, the builds, developer environments. People were leaving, and they were telling leaders that they were leaving because it was hard to get things done at GitHub. This is back in 2020, if I'm getting my years right. Well, hindsight's 2020.

At GitHub, I think I told this story to you before, Adam. Tell it again. At GitHub, we had a lot of these problems. Developer tooling, getting releases out, the builds, developer environments. People were leaving, and they were telling leaders that they were leaving because it was hard to get things done at GitHub. This is back in 2020, if I'm getting my years right. Well, hindsight's 2020.

Mm-hmm. And what we ended up doing, we froze features for a quarter. All of GitHub engineering, no features. Whole quarter spent fixing these problems. It was dramatic, right? And things got a lot better as a result. Yeah. Another example is actually Atlassian. Their CTO is very public about how they're focusing on developer productivity, developer experience.

Mm-hmm. And what we ended up doing, we froze features for a quarter. All of GitHub engineering, no features. Whole quarter spent fixing these problems. It was dramatic, right? And things got a lot better as a result. Yeah. Another example is actually Atlassian. Their CTO is very public about how they're focusing on developer productivity, developer experience.

And at Atlassian, not only do they have a pretty substantial portion of their engineering organization that is devoted to this type of stuff, But they give all product engineering teams at Atlassian 10% of their time to be spent fixing things, as they call it, fixing things that suck, right? That get in the way of...

And at Atlassian, not only do they have a pretty substantial portion of their engineering organization that is devoted to this type of stuff, But they give all product engineering teams at Atlassian 10% of their time to be spent fixing things, as they call it, fixing things that suck, right? That get in the way of...

So, but to answer your question, Adam, what do we do about it and what's preventing us from doing things about it? I think it actually boils down to the fact that you see a survey like this from Stack Overflow, right? People are unhappy, you know, it's because of technical debt and the developer experience issues.

So, but to answer your question, Adam, what do we do about it and what's preventing us from doing things about it? I think it actually boils down to the fact that you see a survey like this from Stack Overflow, right? People are unhappy, you know, it's because of technical debt and the developer experience issues.

But to actually do something about it as a business, you have to be able to calculate that the cost of doing something about it is outweighed by the return on investment you're going to get after you do something about it. And I think that's a really hard problem right now. No one knows how to actually quantify this thing.

But to actually do something about it as a business, you have to be able to calculate that the cost of doing something about it is outweighed by the return on investment you're going to get after you do something about it. And I think that's a really hard problem right now. No one knows how to actually quantify this thing.

set of things the developer experience right and it's something that you can take to the cfo or ceo and say hey like we we're slow because of x y and z and if we fix x y and z we'll be this much faster and it'll be worth it that's that's the hard problem so no one can make the case for doing something about a lot of this stuff because you can't talk about it in terms of dollars

set of things the developer experience right and it's something that you can take to the cfo or ceo and say hey like we we're slow because of x y and z and if we fix x y and z we'll be this much faster and it'll be worth it that's that's the hard problem so no one can make the case for doing something about a lot of this stuff because you can't talk about it in terms of dollars

Dang.

Dang.

The way they ask that question, I wonder if that's how they've asked it before. I'd be curious if you could...

The way they ask that question, I wonder if that's how they've asked it before. I'd be curious if you could...