Cofounder & CEO, DevZero. Passionate about helping developers work better.
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Day to day, developers struggle with a frustrating problem: developer toil. In a 2017 book on site reliability engineering published online, Google defined “toil” as “the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”
Developer toil wastes developers’ valuable time, energy and resources, putting companies at a significant disadvantage. And it’s not just smaller companies suffering the consequences of developer toil. Consider this: In its book cited above, Google noted that quarterly surveys of its site reliability engineers “show that the average time spent toiling is about 33%.”
Unfortunately, however, developer toil has become normalized in the tech industry. Many companies are not giving this issue the attention it deserves. But by not sufficiently addressing developer toil, companies are putting themselves at a disadvantage. To innovate and be leaders in their industries, companies must take steps to reduce developer toil as much as possible.
Developer Toil Hinders Efficiency And Innovation
Given the many layoffs in the tech industry, it’s more important than ever for companies to recognize the consequences of developer toil.
Developer toil bogs down developers’ workflows. They have to constantly stop and deal with tedious tasks. The more time developers spend on manual, repetitive tasks, the less time they have to innovate and iterate, meaning they won’t be able to work on product updates and enhancements that will generate new leads and retain existing customers. The time a developer spends debugging a local dev environment hardware limitation or waiting for a build to finish could instead be spent working on code that will refine a product’s UX, streamline the user journey or improve responsiveness.
Hindered innovation hurts companies’ bottom lines. Companies pay developers to solve complex problems and improve products to attract and retain customers. But, with developer toil, companies are instead paying their software teams to focus on mundane tasks that don’t move the needle.
Developer Toil Leads To Developer Burnout
In addition to hindering innovation, developer toil also leads to a poor developer experience and burnout.
A survey published in 2022 by Stack Overflow examined what makes developers unhappy at work. Of those surveyed, 45% noted a “lack of productivity” as a reason for unhappiness at work, 24% pinned an inability to solve problems in their way as a reason and 23% indicated not being able to see the “visible, direct impact” of their work as a reason.
These three reasons (of many) have something in common: developer toil contributes to all of them. The more time developers spend on mundane tasks, the less productive they actually are, and the less they can take the reins to solve problems with their creative approaches. In turn, they’re less likely to be able to see the visible, direct impact of their work, given that these mundane tasks don’t add up to much impact.
When developers join companies, they want to work on projects that advance the bottom line. Such projects make them more likely to feel fulfilled professionally. Unhappy developers are at a higher risk of burnout, which could result in lower productivity and role effectiveness, likely culminating in them leaving for new opportunities. When developers leave, companies are left in a lurch. Company leaders must quickly redistribute workloads and start the hiring process to keep project milestones on track to the extent possible. In the process, companies lose a lot of money and crucial institutional knowledge.
How To Reduce Developers Toil And Improve The Developer Experience
Reducing developer toil starts with company stakeholders (including members of the C-suite and leaders of technical teams) sitting down with developers to understand the challenges they’re facing and what can be done to streamline their workflows.
A clear understanding of a company’s existing engineering operations is key to introducing the right solutions. It’s essential to speak to various engineering team members to understand unique challenges and gain a holistic view of the problems. During this process, company leaders should also monitor key metrics, namely the number of deployments in the production system per engineer per week or the number of pull requests per engineer per week (or both).
Combined, these conversations and metrics will help company leaders pinpoint the most pressing issues so they can start tackling them by introducing the right tools across the stack, such as the one my company provides and other solutions that target streamlining various elements of the developer workflow.
A few specific steps to take include:
• Reducing code dependencies by refactoring the code into smaller components. Doing so allows developers to work independently.
• Decreasing dependencies on other teams by implementing self-service portals such as internal developer platforms (IDPs) that give developers more autonomy in provisioning resources such as machines and databases, using existing blueprints created by platform teams.
• Implementing internal tooling. Along with IDPs, standardizing development environments is another great way to cut new developers' onboarding time, reduce time spent on overhead activities (such as debugging localhost) and increase coding time.
• Cutting wait times. This can be done by parallelizing build tasks, caching intermediate results and utilizing build tools that only recompile changed code. Another effective strategy is to implement a distributed build system. By distributing build tasks across multiple machines or nodes, the overall build time can be significantly reduced.
As for measuring improvement, you can use a standard DORA tracking tool or build your own dashboard. There are many ways indicators that developer toil has decreased: You can expect to see an increase in velocity and deployment frequency, a reduction in failure rates and lead time to deploy and an increase in developer satisfaction.
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