The Shape of Code

My discussions with both managers and developers on software development processes invariably end up on the topic of developer happiness. Managers want to keep their development teams happy, and there is a longstanding developer culture of entitlement to work that they find interesting.

Companies in general want to keep their employees happy, irrespective of the kind of work they do. What makes developers different, from management’s perspective, is that demand for good software developers far outstrips supply.

Many developers approach software engineering as a hedonistic activity; yes, there are those who only do it for the money.

The huge quantity of open source software, much of it written out of personal interest rather than paid employment, provides evidence for there being many people willing to create software because of the pleasure they get from doing it.

Software developers only get to indulge in hedonistic development activities (e.g., choosing which tools to use, how to structure their code, and not having to provide estimates) because of the relative ease with which competent developers can obtain another job. Replacing developers is time-consuming and expensive, which gives existing employees a lot of bargaining power with management.

Some of the consequences of managements’ desire to keep developers happy, or at least not unhappy include:

• Not pushing too hard for an estimate of the likely time needed to complete a task,
• giving developers a lot of say in which languages/tools/packages they use. This creates a downstream need to support a wider variety of development ecosystems than might otherwise have been necessary, and further siloing development teams,
• allowing developers to spend time beautifying their code to meet personal opinions about the visual appearance of source.

The balance of power that facilitates hedonism driven development is determined by the relative size of the employment market in the supply and demand for software developers. Once demand falls below the available supply, finding a new job becomes more difficult, shifting the balance of power away from developers to managers.

I am not expecting supply to exceed demand any time soon. While International computer companies have been laying off lots of staff, demand from small companies appears to be strong (based on the ever-present ‘We’re hiring’ slides I regularly see at London meetups), but things may change. Tools such as ChatGPT are far from good enough to replace developers in the near term.