August 18, 2022 Labor Shortages and the Developer Experience

Labor shortages are impacting developers at every level; they want to be heard.

Developer Experience, product-led growth, and other initiatives put developers and their skills in the driver’s seat of significant organizational decisions. Ten years ago, we found ourselves acknowledging that developers needed to be treated like decision makers and now we are living in it. As the Head of Developer Experience at Camunda, I sit in a position to enable internal and external developers. This means I get to see firsthand how companies are grappling with hiring and retaining talent when it comes to how they evaluate and use new products and technologies.

For organizations looking to enhance their developer experience while working within the constraints of today’s labor shortage and looming recession, it’s invaluable to be aware of the new demands of the modern developer to ensure long term success. Let’s explore these in more detail.

Developers want to be heard

Outside of a 1:1 with their manager, developers want a place to provide their feedback. This could be product features, internal processes, company initiatives, you name it. Engaged employees are curious employees, and you need to make sure you have an outlet that supports this.

Developers are often the hardest crowd to engage because tech is everywhere. While ultimately, a product manager may own the roadmap, having a way for developers, either as customers or the internal dev team, to provide acknowledged feedback that doesn’t go into a black hole will keep them engaged. Engaged employees stay.

One way to keep developers engaged is by providing opportunities for them to support documentation through docs-as-code so your team can receive pull requests (PRs) or issues from external developer community members as well as internal employees. This provides your team with a feedback mechanism where anyone can clarify documentation not just for themselves but any user of your company’s platform. On top of this, offer forums, Slack, conferences, meetups, and other channels to hear from your developer community.

Developers want a curated experience

“Meet developers where they are at” is a common phrase you’ll hear in developer relations. Meeting developers where they are at includes creating SDKs, clients, API wrappers, code snippets, and other developer tooling specific to their needs. Is the API dead? No, but if you have a choice between a well-crafted SDK (software development kit) in python or crafting your own from the API, why do extra work? At Camunda, this means fully supporting some of this tooling but also enabling developers who do write their own to contribute it back to our community through the Camunda Community Hub.

Giving them the tools to be successful is one thing, but what about career paths? Do you have a career path that supports frontend or backend developers becoming full stack developers? Does career progression within the company require specialization in a particular coding language? Are you pushing your most talented engineers into management positions when they are actively telling you they don’t want to manage?

Developers need support prioritizing tech debt

This one is more of an internal issue, it can present externally when new product or vendor evaluation timelines are unrealistically tight, or you see devs looking for “zero dollar solutions” in open source software. While I am empathetic for their situation, to me this is a clear indication their organization has some internal issues like the ones below.

Talk to anyone about on-call schedules, and it can make or break an otherwise appealing role. If outages, pages, and incidents are frequent, without support to fix the underlying root cause, you’ve set the team up for burnout.

Replatforming efforts can be looming and expensive but also provide an opportunity for development teams to learn (or relearn!) new skills and tackle years of unchecked tech debt. When you factor in efficiency gains or developer satisfaction, is it really as expensive as it looks? Or, put a different way, is continuing to run on your current stack worth losing your current dev team if they are otherwise feeling unsupported or uninspired?

Developers are confused by your job descriptions and your recruiting tactics

1. “Looking for a rockstar developer to join our fast-paced team!”
2. “I guarantee this opportunity is better than your current company and career path.”
3. “Remote since before the pandemic!”
4. “6-month contract, relocation required.”

As a developer myself, these are actual phrases I’ve seen in job descriptions and emails from recruiters.

1. I’ve yet to meet someone who really resonated with “rockstar developer,” but I’ve easily met many developers who would consider this a red flag and avoid the company altogether.
2. This comes off as insulting to my current company and me and could be an indicator of your company culture.
3. This came in on LinkedIn, which I know suffers from a ton of 3rd-party broad messaging, but I’ve been remote since 2018. You need to hook me with something else.
4. Even my freelance, highly mobile dev friends will shy away from these. It takes 90-180 days to onboard, depending on who you ask. Where is the value for the contractor?

A great way to discourage developers is to post a job description with an impossible amount of experience – “React dev with 15 years of experience” – when the initial release was nine years ago at the time of writing this. Your job description just became a meme.

Taking a focused look at developers through the developer experience, internally and externally, is the investment your company needs to make today. If you have a developer-centric product, I challenge you to turn your focus inward to the talented developers in your organization today.

About the Author:
Amara is the Head of Developer Experience at Camunda. Before her step into developer relations, she was an enterprise web application developer focusing on line of business applications and assisting developers across various teams on implementing proprietary and open source solutions. She’s passionate about UX, technical communities (both online and offline) and excited to see where advances in AI take us. In her spare time, she experiments in the kitchen and plays video games.

Contact:
camunda@pancomm.com
www.camunda.com

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