Developer Experience as a Competitive Advantage: Why Investing in Development Efficiency Pays Off

INTRODUCTION

A lot of companies have come to realize that investing in their people can have a huge impact on their business and therefore their income. How is this possible you ask? It’s really simple actually. Just focus on the below:

TURNOVER

If you treat people well, they won’t have the tendency to leave. Duh, but people tend to forget. And companies tend to forget that they are a group of people. 

Lower turnover of staff means that you spend less money looking for new talent. You also save money by not waiting for a new guy to learn how your company works before they start contributing in line with what you spend on them. Math don’t lie.
 

HIRING

At the same time, if you do need to hire new people - where do you think, they will want to go? To the place that offers the most money? Maybe. To a place that is toxic and unproductive? Nope. A place that can afford to pay well because it is efficient and doesn’t require 100 engineers to do one thing? Definitely. So be THAT company.

This way, you can attract great talent – and your HR won’t have to bother people on LinkedIn and be politely refused, if not ignored, all day long. And great talent should result in a great product - which is what you want. Being great is great. Just look at Alexander. 
 

CULTURE

Make sure that your culture is healthy. Don’t hire toxic people or fire them fast. If you have a small team, take them out to lunch every week. If you have a big team.. make it smaller – just kidding. You can book a bowling alley or a laser tag arena. Be creative.. or consult ChatGPT. 

Also, check in with each team member to see what they think about their colleagues regularly. If two or more people think someone else is a dickens, it’s probably not a coincidence. 

One more important thing is to watch out for slackers – it is not fair for one person to work extra just because someone else gets away with being lazy.

To sum up - happy developers are productive developers.
 

PRODUCTIVITY AND SHIPPING FEATURES

For some reason, a lot of companies still stick to very manual tasks. Who likes manual work in software development? Yes, that’s right - no one. 

If you can automate it, automate it (without overengineering it). This can either mean that you need less staff in general, which saves your company money, or it can mean that if people aren’t forced to do monkey work, you can put them to use where it matters (and makes money). If they have time, they have time to learn new skills, ship more features and fix more bugs, which in turn makes your business more likely to appeal to customers. And make more money. Math still doesn’t lie.