How To Actually Keep Software Developers Happy

Welcome to my LinkedIn newsletter! In each issue of Entrepreneurship and Leadership, I'll be sharing my thoughts on scaling, leading and funding high-growth startups and what the future of innovation looks like. Subscribe?here?to stay updated.

Software developers can be a restless bunch. In a recent global survey, almost 75% said they’re looking for a new job, or are open to the idea. Developers cited better pay as the main reason for jumping ship, but they also named a focus on the developer experience as the quality that makes a company most appealing.

As the founder and leader of multiple software firms with thousands of developers, I know that demand for the best people is as strong as ever, even in the midst of an economic crunch. At the same time, the rise of remote work has contributed to job hopping, loosening the bonds that develop when team members collaborate in person. If a star developer has a bad day with their manager, that could be all it takes for them to quit.?

This presents a challenge for businesses across industries. Given that nearly all companies today are software companies, attracting and keeping good developers is supremely important. For starters, there’s the loss of institutional knowledge when one departs—often leaving the code they wrote all but useless. Then there’s the impact of losing a truly exceptional developer. The delta between an ordinary developer and a great one is like the gulf separating the average writer from a bestselling author.?

So, how to keep software engineers happy? I’ve got a few suggestions.

What does a good developer culture look like?

For companies that want to create a good developer experience, early-stage Silicon Valley startups offer a helpful model. When a tech startup has just a handful of team members, it’s less complex, with fewer processes and bottlenecks that slow down developers.?

One recent study breaks this kind of optimal developer experience down into three practical dimensions: flow state, cognitive load and feedback loops.

To understand flow state, remember that fundamentally, coding is problem-solving. When a developer is fully engaged in trying to solve a problem—in the zone, with headphones on—there’s nothing worse than being interrupted or delayed.?

Cognitive load refers to the mental effort a developer must expend to complete a task. If that task is complex, distractions like poorly documented code could overtax them, potentially causing mistakes, delays and other problems.?

Tight feedback loops with end users are crucial too. Insights and analytics are available now in real-time. Developers crave that input to help push updates more quickly and effectively.?

For companies, the trick is sustaining this kind of exceptional developer experience as they scale.

How do you sustain strong dev culture? Pay is just the start?

Like all highly skilled professionals, developers care about compensation. But in my experience, larger cultural considerations can trump pay for most engineers.?

First, do developers really understand and believe in the mission of the company and its product? If not, it’s hard to recruit them and to keep them around.?

This mission doesn’t have to be grandiose. But it needs to be clear—with real impact on end users. At my company, we build products that make the lives of the 30 million developers on the planet better. Knowing that purpose makes it easier for people to decide whether they care about it enough to join us.?

Second, developers enjoy solving hard problems. If they don’t feel challenged in their role, they’re more likely to start looking for something tougher and more stimulating. With that in mind, it’s crucial to keep finding technical challenges that put them to the test.?

Third, good developers want to work with other good developers. When surrounded by peers whose abilities they respect, they tend to stay happy and motivated.?

To keep developers happy, give them the right tools for the job

Another way to hang on to developers: invest in productivity tools. Paradoxically, software to help developers is overlooked in most organizations. But by automating repetitive tasks so software teams can focus on higher-value work, a company can dramatically reduce the toil that has long dogged the industry.?

Continuous integration/continuous delivery (or CI/CD) tools have become table stakes among high-performing engineering teams. These automate many of the manual human tasks required to get new code into production — all the grunt work that goes into building, testing and deploying updates — saving time and sweat.

AI and machine learning are taking this to the next level. Beyond merely writing code, AI assistants can pitch in during nearly every stage of the software development process. Take debugging: in an industry where code errors sometimes have catastrophic consequences, AI can spot them before they become a problem.?

Running tests—traditionally another time-consuming task, and the reason so many engineering teams have ping-pong tables to kill time—is one more area where AI shines. Test intelligence tools can pinpoint the right set of tests for a particular update, typically shrinking the time to check it from hours to minutes.???

The right culture and the right tools can go a long way toward recreating the flow state, comfortable cognitive load and tight feedback loops that developers crave. But there’s one other daunting challenge in play: visibility.?

You can’t fix what you haven’t measured ?

Ironically, many businesses have no idea whether their software developers are happy or not. With customer and employee engagement surveys now routine in many industries, it’s worth putting the same spotlight on developers.?

An easy starting point: the software efficiency surveys put out by the Engineering Excellence Collective, which measure performance in areas such as testing, deployment and security. Better still, new analytics tools can give leaders an automated pulse check on what needs improvement and how to fix it, with a high level of detail.

Great developers want problems to solve, the tools to solve them and the team to keep them inspired. Tick those boxes, and the odds of your star software engineers walking out the door get a whole lot smaller.

Thank you for reading! I'd like to know your thoughts in the comments below. For more insights from my experience as a serial entrepreneur and how we can harness the power of software to change the world, be sure to?subscribe?to Entrepreneurship and Leadership.