Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week, a remote/hybrid work special: Bribes to relocate you, Fridays are forgotten, and big tech firms stop building offices. (more…)
Over the years, software teams have gradually become more dispersed as technology advancements facilitated hybrid work and allowed teams to collaborate, create and innovate remotely. However, this trend accelerated and became more of a mainstream norm over the last two years during the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring newly dispersed teams to develop a more streamlined hybrid approach to the development process.
When seeking to implement a hybrid environment, it’s important for development leaders to consider how best to coordinate a distributed workforce across time zones, how to track projects effectively and ensure accountability. At Lenovo, these are considerations the Cloud & Software team has had to navigate since its inception due to the global nature of our business. To be effective in a hybrid environment, we adopted certain processes and tools that facilitated open communication and cross-collaboration no matter the location. After evaluating various hybrid methods, here are five best practices that stand out.
In a hybrid work environment, it can be challenging to consistently bring the entire team together at a specific point in time to estimate work, refine issues or plan sprints. Coordinating between busy calendars and multiple time zones is an inefficient use of time, especially when many software projects are deadline-driven. Moreover, many developers are highly creative and want fewer coordinated meetings and more time to contribute when they want, at their own pace.
To navigate these challenges, program managers can adapt the development process to be less regimented and more flexible. Facilitating such events as estimation, sprint planning and backlog refinement in an asynchronous manner within a virtual team workspace can allow all team members, no matter where they are located, to contribute, feel heard and seen and receive feedback from their teammates. Such programs can also enable an automatic way to log decisions and house required software documentation.
Many organizations relate to the challenge of having project data spread across multiple tools. While the development team tracks day-to-day work in one tool, other stakeholders are tracking goals and team KPIs in an entirely different set of tools which can lead to misalignment, something that can be exacerbated in a hybrid environment.
To overcome this challenge, development teams can establish one central location using a work management tool where past, current and future projects live and that all team members can access, reference and share. By leveraging this tool as a single source of truth, team managers can bring visibility and transparency to the development and program management processes while creating stronger alignment.
Our team at Lenovo follows a strict process of documenting the decisions taken throughout the development process and we make that documentation available for all team members to access within the team workspace.
This can be a beneficial practice for project managers that want to strengthen accountability. Encouraging such transparency enables team members and stakeholders to reference the reasoning behind a specific decision, especially if concerns arise later in the project life cycle process. The result is better alignment across the organization.
To maintain a healthy hybrid environment, assigning an owner to each Agile event can make all the difference. By serving as a facilitator, that owner would then be responsible for aligning everyone to a pre-meeting agenda and goal, allowing teams to prepare and review issues and tickets ahead of time. This added organizational step can result in a more streamlined meeting cadence and more productive discussions.
Finding the right combination of tools to support a team’s specific collaboration needs is imperative to a successful hybrid development environment. Seamless and automated collaboration is the key, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution mix. Development leaders should consider tailoring their portfolio of tools around specific needs and look for programs that can help keep a dispersed team on track and synchronized (via direct messaging, ongoing team conversation chats or face-to-face virtual meetings, for example), as well as those that can ensure visibility and improve efficiencies. Whatever external programs are selected, however, should be hosted internally behind the company firewall and VPN for added security.
The modern workplace has changed dramatically in the last two years—in many ways permanently—with flexible, remote and hybrid work driving the greatest transformation of collaboration for software development teams across all sectors. By adapting to new hybrid development strategies, enabling transparency in decision-making and leveraging automation for greater efficiency, the development teams of today and tomorrow will be well equipped to more easily adapt to future disruptions in the workplace.
An analysis of the time 23,000 software engineers spent working in 2021 that was published this week by Jellyfish, a provider of an engineering management platform (EMP), finds cycle times on average were down to 12.6 days, representing a 12.3% decline over 2020. The report, however, also finds commits were down 4% year-over-year, while the number of issues resolved was up 5% year over year.
Jellyfish CEO Andrew Lau said the data suggests that software engineers are opting to commit less code in favor of resolving issues faster. Overall, coding days per engineer were down 8% to less than 1.6 days per week in 2021, the report found.
Engineering teams on average in 2021 allocated 35% of their time to growth and innovation, while 19% was allocated to infrastructure work, up nearly 6% from 2020. Time spent on support work (24%), meanwhile, was down nearly 5% year over year. On average, unplanned work accounted for 22% of the time software engineers spent working in 2021, a 3% increase over the prior year. In general, Lau said the report suggests that engineering teams need to factor more time into schedules for unplanned work as application environments become more complex.
The report also finds engineering organizations using EMPs tend to allocate similar time to “keeping the lights on” and customer support activities as other organizations but spend 29% more time on innovation work and 48% less time on unplanned work. In addition, the report notes teams that devote 50% or more resources to growth and innovation work deliver software at least three times faster than those who commit 25% or less.
Virtual collaboration in the last year has also increased more than 20% as teams continue to embrace remote and hybrid work models, according to the report. Overall, organizations that allow software engineers to work from home remain productive but it’s not quite clear if managers have completely adjusted to the realities of hybrid work, noted Lau. The report also noted that pull request reviews per engineer are up 30% on average to 1.7 reviews per week. Pull review comments per engineer were up 23% year over year.
In addition to the report, Jellyfish conducted a survey of 128 engineering leaders that finds more than 79% expect to grow their teams in 2022, with 57% expecting more than 10% headcount growth. Improving operations, tooling and processes (36%) is their highest priority in 2022, followed by hiring and retaining talent (18%), improving infrastructure (17%) and managing technical debt (10%). The biggest overall challenge is making sure everyone is focused on the highest priority work (45%), the survey finds.
However, only 27% of the leaders currently track productivity metrics, despite more than two-thirds (67%) describing them as being very important or critical to track. Among teams that do track metrics, more than half (53%) do so manually, the survey finds.
While the productivity of software engineers will naturally vary by organization, it’s apparent the weight of application environments is starting to impact how much time can be devoted to building and deploying new applications. The challenge, of course, is demand for new applications in the age of digital transformation has never been higher, which in part explains why so many organizations are struggling to find and retain software engineers.
Enterprise business processes are run on evolving applications, and the DevOps team needs to be as efficient as the applications they create. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on DevOps productivity—and that impact hasn’t always been positive.
Tracking the performance of the DevOps team has become more challenging in a remote and hybrid world. Like everyone else, developers have become remote workers throughout the pandemic which means adapting to a new way of working. There has been a lot of research done on the impact of work-from-home on productivity. Of course, measuring any developer’s productivity was already a complex task. It’s not as though you can use a simple metric like the number of lines of code produced per day; it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Working from home has made it even more challenging for developers to stay productive. There are dozens of distractions when you work from home, and research shows that it can take even the most skilled developer 15 to 20 minutes to resume work once they have been interrupted. There’s also more stress associated with balancing work and home life when working remotely. According to Catalyst, 92% of workers say they are feeling burnout from the stress of remote work.
In many ways, the trend toward remote work has been a windfall for developers. The nature of coding has always lent itself to a hybrid or remote work environment, but unfounded concerns about securing intellectual property have always been an impediment.
A recent Gartner survey revealed that employees are three times more likely to become high performers when given flexibility as to where, how, and when they work. Remote work also enhances flexibility and eliminates wasted time commuting. And work-from-home reduces childcare responsibilities. Catalyst found that 32% of women with child-care concerns are less likely to leave their jobs if they have work-from-home as an option.
Remote work also eliminates geographic barriers, which is a well-understood benefit in the software industry. Being able to hire programmers working from home anywhere in the world increases the size of the talent pool and makes it easier to find developers with the right skillset.
Of course, there are challenges for DevOps teams that embrace a remote work model. Communication is probably the biggest challenge. Zoom meetings may not be as effective as in-person meetings since it’s harder to read facial expressions and pick up non-verbal cues. It’s up to the team leader or senior manager to promote effective communications. It’s also important to have the right tools, have the right communications channels and maintain respectful interactions. Even with a remote work environment, the team dynamic can be adversely affected by the misuse of responsibility, behavioral issues and disrespectful behavior.
Supporting collaboration in a hybrid work environment requires new processes, new guidelines and new tools. The best place to start is by choosing the right collaboration platforms and procedures. For example, email is a poor channel for immediate requests, but you don’t want to be answering continuous phone calls. Establish protocols for using email, chat, teleconferences and meetings. Adopting cloud communications tools also gives you more agility and scalability.
When choosing the right collaboration tools consider security. Working off-site gives you less control over enterprise access. Remote workers access enterprise systems using different devices and public and private networks. To reduce vulnerability to cyberattacks provide safe and secure network access with multiple security layers. Adopt virtual private networking (VPNs), remote desktop protocol (RDP) clients, and malware protection. Workers tend to be less security conscious when working remotely so take what steps you can to reduce risk.
In addition to having the right tools, you must have the right approach. To continuously improve efficiency you need transparency, inspection and adaptation, just as you do with DevOps. Start by establishing and documenting a clear set of expectations for the remote team. Also, create a leadership hierarchy. Even though they are working from home, everyone needs a work structure. It’s up to the team leaders to create a stable work environment. Lack of clarity removes that sense of structure and safety and can undermine the team.
Maintaining transparency is the best approach for any remote work culture. Establishing a workplace fueled by honesty and openness and where every voice is heard ensures everyone is working to achieve a common goal and keeps morale high.
Maintaining a successful remote work environment depends on respecting the four Cs: Communication, collaboration, connectivity and culture. The four Cs are interdependent and work together to create an effective digital work environment, providing an employee experience across locations, devices, channels and situations.
Once you have laid the foundation for remote collaboration, the next step is to monitor productivity. There are a few ways to look at DevOps team productivity. You can look at the final output of the overall effort, assessing the application that is the end product. You also can measure overall team productivity.
To monitor key metrics to assess team productivity, project managers must be prepared to drill down to evaluate hot spots:
Don’t measure productivity based on coding. Developer contributions also include designing new features, functional discussions, code review, documentation, testing and bug fixes, meeting with customers and other tasks.
Improving DevOps productivity is also a product of automation. In addition to streamlining real-time collaboration with tools such as instant messaging and Microsoft Teams, shortening development time with automated testing tools and AI-powered test frameworks eliminates manual processes and frees time for more productive tasks.
If you are looking for a silver lining from the pandemic, consider the evolution of the remote work environment. Supporting remote DevOps developers is nothing new, but forcing employees to work from home has made the hybrid work environment more efficient. DevOps teams continue to invent better ways of working that promote flexible work hours, higher productivity and a better work-life balance.
Brian Lavallée from Ciena talks with Mike Vizard about how the work-from-anywhere movement has impacted DevOps, networking and security. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.
Mike Vizard: Hey, guys. Thanks for the throw. We’re here with Brian Lavallée who is senior director for solutions marketing at Ciena. Brian, welcome to the show.
Brian Lavallée: Thanks. Nice to be here.
Mike Vizard: You guys just put out this study talking about what’s happening on the technology impact from working from home. A lot of folks are accessing cloud resources. They have home networks that may or may not be up to the task. Are we looking at some sort of networking crisis coming up as we move to working from anywhere? Do people understand that bandwidth is going to be an issue?
Brian Lavallée: I wouldn’t say it’s a crisis, but it is a work in progress. Just over the last year, year and a half, the global pandemic, our homes have turned into the new branch office, the new classroom. People are learning, playing, and working from home, and it’s put additional stress on the network. One of the main challenges is speeds, because now you have two, three, four people accessing the same broadband connection from home at the same time, and then you have the whole security aspect, where if your home is the new branch office, very often you need additional security to do work, not only with your head office, your colleagues, but also with your cloud applications.
Mike Vizard: I have found myself trying to fight for bandwidth with an 11-year-old, so I know what the issues are and what the problems can be. Do you think companies, as we go forward, are going to turn around and say to their employees, “Here is the router we want you to use”? Are they going to give them that router, or the access point at home? How far will they go to make all this happen and maybe provide that additional layer of security?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, I think, for sure, adding additional security, even availability, a more resilient connection is necessary going forward. Companies or enterprises are going to implement this differently. Some may do a lot of their security capabilities in the cloud. This allows you to have a centralized location to do all your security, you know, talking about SASE, _____ connectivity, and because it’s centralized, it’s easier to implement and control, rather than having specialized devices or specialized software sitting on everybody’s laptop. If you’re a large enterprise, you can have thousands to many thousands of people working from home, so centralizing your security aspect with a high-speed connection is probably the way moving forward.
Mike Vizard: What impact does that have back on the core networks? I mean, if everybody has suddenly got more bandwidth at the edge, does that have a cascading effect up through the rest of the network infrastructure? Do I need additional core routers or networks? How will this play out in your mind?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, _____. Content is created and consumed at the edge, and that’s from humans or machines ‒ think sensors, cameras, and so on. Definitely, as we open up the access ramps, 5G is a way of opening up the wireless access ramp, plus you have a variety of wireline broadband technologies for the home, even the offices. For sure, it has a knock-on effect into the core network because, if you think about it, most of the content and applications that you access, whether it’s on your smart phone, your laptop, tablet, or whatever device you’re using, it’s sitting on a datacenter somewhere. That could be a datacenter close to you, an edge datacenter maybe sitting in the same city as you. It could be a datacenter on the other side of the world sitting in Norway or Sweden or Finland.
Mike Vizard: I’m feeling like a lot of the applications that people are starting to build, consume data and analyze data at the point at where it’s created more, it’s more happening out at the edge. Is there a lot more sensitivity around latency? Will the laws of networking physics come back and bite us soon, and are we seeing new classes of applications?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, and that’s a good question because it leans into the topic of discussion, one of the hotter ones today, which is edge computing or edge cloud. By putting storage and compute access closer to the end-users ‒ again, those end-users could be humans or machines ‒ it does inherently reduce the latency only because you have a shorter physical distance to travel. But, we have to remember latency is not just about distance, it’s about the amount of network nodes that are sitting between you and your content, so the more network devices you go through ‒ switches, routers, and so on ‒ the more latency is incurred and accumulated. Pushing the storage and compute closer to the edge with high-speed connections is a very good way of reducing latency, and it also opens up a whole bunch of new applications where latency is a critical factor beyond just increased speed.
Mike Vizard: I feel like right after the pandemic, we sent everybody home, we gave them their little wireless network, we hooked them up with a VPN, and they accessed the applications in the office. Then, they went out to the cloud and they had this kind of backhauling effect of the network traffic flow. You mentioned SASE. Are we going to change the way we think about how applications are deployed and how we access them, whether they’re up in the cloud? Is the routing concept that we’ve known all these years changing? How do you think we’re going to go forward from here?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, so I think the increased adoption of cloud-based services is an unstoppable juggernaut. It is happening. There are security concerns. Our survey that we did, the study, we did show that there was a security concern of moving more and more into the cloud, but the cloud providers, the telecom operators, they’ve done a lot of excellent work over the last few years to address security, make increased security for their end-users. The cloud-based service providers, they realize that security is top of mind above everything else, so I think that will continue going forward. As more and more end-users are accessing cloud-based applications and content, the network becomes a critical factor because the network now is sitting in between you and the content you’re trying to access.
Mike Vizard: Do you think the bad guys have figured all this out and they’re targeting people at the end point now and looking at these slightly misconfigured networks? Sometimes we’re using fraud RDP protocols. Are they getting it? Are they after us?
Brian Lavallée: They’ll always be there, nefarious actors, bad actors, whatever you want to call them, so they will always be there, but the cloud providers, the telecom operators, they know this, so they are consistently upgrading, modernizing, and putting increased security capabilities into their network. It’s always going to be a battle of people who want to do not so good things with the network and content, and the people that actually run those datacenters and networks. I think that will continue going forward, it’s kind of human nature, but we’ve made great strides as an industry, and that’s across IT, telecom, and cloud-based services in terms of security. With more and more people from home, I mean right now we’re living in probably the largest working-from-home experiment of our species, and, if you think about it, the network, it has bent in a few places, right?
Most of the networks are running hotter, but it hasn’t broken. The Internet has not broken. A lot of people early on thought that if everybody moves home, it’s not that you have more capacity coming to the home, but the traffic patterns have changed. During the day, when a lot of people went to school and work, the traffic was to the schools and the head offices, but now the whole traffic pattern has moved into the home. Although a lot of people were concerned, I think the telecom operators deserve a lot of credit. The network has bent in a few places, but it hasn’t broken, and they’ve just learned a lot over the last year, and the networks will just be that much more reliable going forward.
Mike Vizard: Prior to the pandemic, the carriers were trying to encourage people to offload from the network and use WiFi. Now we have 5G, and people are talking about 6G and who knows what comes after that. Are we getting to a point where we can just run 5G into the home? Will that get cost-effective at some point and we won’t have all these WiFi routers, or will it always be some sort of a balance between 5G, 6G and WiFi and we have to figure it out?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, I mean my personal opinion on that, I think it will always be a mix of technologies. I’ve been in this industry long enough to know that a technology network completely disappears, at least not in my career. It always has places of use. The big difference with 5G over 4G LTE and previous technologies, and even WiFi, previous generations of mobile technologies, it brings a lot of new benefits to the table, right? If we look at the faster speeds, this is what gets the most press coverage because that’s what people will see right away, but it also brings much lower latency. We’re talking order of magnitudes lower latency. It connects to a wider variety of connected devices, such as sensors and smart devices, and then we have this whole concept of network slicing, which can guarantee end-to-end performance.
You can guarantee the speed, latency, and resilience. We haven’t had that in the past with any mobile network generation, and, to a large extent, we haven’t even had that on the wireline technologies. So, 5G coming right into your home, if you think about it, if you’re a network operator, it’s much easier just to send a 5G hotspot, it could be a router, residential gateway to somebody’s home, they turn it on, they plug it in the wall, and it discovers the mobile network and then BOOM, you’ve got one-gigabit-per-second capacity right to your home. That is, I think, the way of the future in many cases, but there are some technical challenges that still need to be overcome. But, most operators are looking at 5G fixed wireless access to the residential, but even businesses as something in their toolkit going forward to compete with wireline technologies.
Mike Vizard: Do you think there is a rebellion coming among the end-users who are using this stuff? When you hear them, they’re kind of complaining a lot about the experience, so do you think that at some point they’re going to start picking what companies they want to work for based on what kind of work-from-home, work-from-anywhere experience they can get? Will that factor into hiring and retention more than it has in the past?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah. I mean, the network is critical infrastructure today, especially for the younger generation who were born and raised on having always-on connectivity. I think that will continue going forward. But, as more people work from home, I know we hear a lot of talk about the new normal, what ire the workplace, for instance, or the school systems going to look like after the pandemic subsides? We don’t really know. But, what I think we do know is more people will be working from home. I see it in my personal life, I see it with my colleagues, I see it with friends and family. Their companies are looking at implementing working from home at least a couple of days a week. There are a lot of benefits to the company to do this, as well, so the network will become that much more important.
I think people will shop around if the provider they have, the network provider, is not giving them the performance that they need, and it will become a highly competitive marketplace. I mean, it is pretty competitive now, but I think it will be that much more so going forward in terms of speed, latency, and availability, the three main things that you need with a high-speed connection to your home.
Mike Vizard: I might even one day factor networking costs into my compensation packet, but we’ll see what happens.
Brian Lavallée: There you go.
Mike Vizard: What is your best advice to people who are on the IT side of this equation, they’re the network managers, they’re security people. What is the conversation that they should be having higher up the food chain to the board of directors about what needs to happen to really enable this next wave of work?
Brian Lavallée: Yeah, I mean, the higher speed to the home is something that a lot of people talk about. We just talked about it earlier, more people working, playing, and learning from home, so capacity will always be at the forefront of discussions and having competitiveness for an operator with another operator. But, I think increased security features, this could be wrapped around a broadband connection to your home, so rather than just buying a high-speed pipe to your service provider, they would also provide you with SASE type of capabilities, so security, firewalls, and so on. I think looking at bundling, IT services with the connection is definitely the way to go. It is a differentiator, and it is what people will be looking for because if you’re the average home user, whether it’s for playing, learning, or working, you really don’t care what technology you’re buying, as long as it’s cost-effective and it meets your needs.
I think my advice for the operators is to look at what is available recently, some of the newer technologies ‒ virtualization and SASE technologies and the SD _____, a whole bunch of other technologies ‒ and start to wrap these into a bundle that you solve most, if not all of the needs of the subscriber, and then you could differentiate far above and beyond just a higher speed.
Mike Vizard: All right, guys, you heard it here. Faster things that are insecure do not necessarily represent progress. Hey, Brian, thanks for being on the show.
Brian Lavallée: Happy to be here. Thank you.
Mike Vizard: All right, guys, back to you in the studio.
[End of Audio]
Charlene O’Hanlon and Michael Davis, CRO at Rollbar, discuss findings from a recent developer survey exploring how devs feel about the return to the workplace. The video is below, followed by a transcript of the conversation.
Announcer: This is Digital Anarchist.
Charlene O’Hanlon: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to TechStrong TV. I’m Charlene O’Hanlon, and I’m here now with Michael Davis, who is the CRO at Rollbar. Michael, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.
Michael Davis: Thank you, Charlene. Great to be here.
O’Hanlon: Well it’s great to have you here. I am really fascinated about a recent developer survey that you guys came out with regarding their attitudes toward going back into the office, and that’s always a hot topic among organizations no matter what they do. A lot of companies are grappling with just the aftermath, if you will, of the pandemic and the return to the workplace. If you rewind about 12 months ago, we were hearing stories about companies deciding that they were never going to have their employees come back and they were going to work remotely 100 percent all the time.
And a lot of organizations, or a lot of employees I should say, kind of took those cues and decided that they just were going to go and move wherever they wanted to. And so now a year later companies are saying, “Well maybe we should come back into the office at least part time.”
Davis: Yeah. Right.
O’Hanlon: So there have been a lot of kind of ping-ponging I guess, for lack of a better term, and I truly believe that the rest of this year there’s going to be a lot of fallout from organizations dealing with employees who are no longer able to come into the office because of their location. But I’m interested in finding out what you guys found in your survey regarding that and some of the other findings that maybe surprised you.
Davis: Yeah. That’s a great intro, although I might push us back even before COVID. I think this is especially relevant for a lot of the software development teams that we work with. If you go back before COVID, we had customers where their entire teams of developers didn’t even own a laptop. They were literally in the office all the time, every day. And so not only are companies now wrestling with this transition post COVID, but they had a huge transition they went through pre COVID, right? And that certainly put a lot of stress and strain on the companies, but more importantly on the actual developers themselves.
And so here we are now coming to the end of this, as you’re describing, and we’re going through another transition. And I agree, I think what the survey starts to show is that this is not going to be black or white type of thing. It’s not going to be all of one or the other for many of the reasons you already mentioned. The survey was very clear in that first off it said 77 percent of developers were definitely significantly impacted by COVID and what this meant for them, and now as you start to interview folks and do the surveys you find that it’s a real mixed bag. You have folks who’ve enjoyed the freedom, enjoyed that flexibility, and have started to adjust to that to some extent.
But I think one of the most interesting findings is that they’re missing that face-to-face component of their work. And if you think about developers and what they do, this is a team sport, right?
O’Hanlon: Right, right.
Davis: They’re really missing that day-to-day, face-to-face interaction, and especially given the sort of raised stakes, which is another thing that came out of this survey. What we found was sort of this external pressure on development was even raised higher. Why? Well, because customers are needing to interact with companies through software. So there’s even more pressure on building more software faster. So these are some interesting things that we saw sort of pulling against each other.
O’Hanlon: So what do you think is the answer here? I understand that developers crave that face-to-face. I also see people who are now dealing with a level of social anxiety that maybe they never had dealt with before in their life. If you’re a year away from somebody or large groups of people it can be tough to reintegrate yourself into that environment. And as much as we all say I can’t wait for things to get back the way that they used to, we can go to concerts, we can go shopping and not have to worry about wearing a mask or whatever, you put people in some of these situations and it’s difficult for them. Some more than others.
Some are just like, yeah, whatever, you know, let’s just go back and it’ll be fine the way that it was. But I’m not sure when people say I want to work with all these people, I want to get back into the scrum, I want to do this and do that, I’m just not sure when they actually do it that that’s really what they wanted. Do you think that there’s going to be maybe buyer’s remorse if you know what I mean?
Davis: Yeah, there could be. My guess – and again, it’s based on some of the survey data we’re seeing – you do have this mixed feeling about your sort of life balance isn’t necessarily all you thought it would be by being home all the time. But I think you’re going to see the same thing. If we went back full time in the office people would be feeling that same kind of pressure around the commute and the things that go with that. So my gut says that now that companies have adjusted and people have adjusted more to being away, we’re going to see this hybrid environment.
You’re going to see more of an environment where people are going to be in the office at certain times, but they’re going to have the ability to work from home at certain times, which again, carries its own set of things. We’ve seen lots of investment in tools, Zoom being one of them we’re on right now, but there’s a long way to go. Because the other thing the survey showed was that by having these distances it’s harder to get those answers, let’s say, as a developer that you might need in the moment. When someone’s not two cubicles away from you, you have to hope that they’re on Slack. And if they’re not, then you’ve got a delay and a problem.
So I think the next thing we’re seeing is we’re seeing more investment in additional tools, in additional types of processes that help this hybrid environment more.
O’Hanlon: Do you think that we’re going to see an increase in these distributed workforces on a full-time basis either as a direct result of the mass exodus during the pandemic or just because they can, that they’re recognizing that maybe we don’t have to be in the office all the time? Or Joe left and he can do it full time, so I’m going to do the same thing and what are they going to do?
Davis: Right.[Laughs]
O’Hanlon: Take away my birthday? It’s going to be one of these – I think there’s going to be this push-pull. And so I’m wondering do you agree with me? Is this something that very might happen? And what do you kind of see? How can organizations – how do you expect them to react to that?
Davis: Yeah. And I would add to the points you made one other thing, which is companies I think have learned that once you remove this need for everyone to be in the office all the time this also starts to free up your ability to recruit more broadly and it gives you flexibility to bring on the type of people you want wherever they sit, right?
O’Hanlon: Right.
Davis: So I think that’s going to play in as well, and that’s why I think it really will be this hybrid environment. So what can they do about it? Well, they’ve got to be really mindful about how people work and they’ve got to be investing. Companies have to be investing in the right kind of tools. I’ll toot our horn a little bit here. Rollbar is about this sort of platform that gives you visibility across your teams on specific errors that you have in your code.
That’s one example. If companies have tools like that in place, now you don’t have to be sitting two cubicles away. You’ve got the data you need right in front of you, real time, to be able to make those kind of decisions. That’s one example. There’s many, many more, but it’s going to be thinking about these workflows somewhat differently and making sure you have the right processes and data so people can operate more efficiently.
O’Hanlon: Yeah. It’s going to be an interesting year I think as we do kind of transition back to life post COVID or even the final throes of COVID, because so much happened over the last 12 years and it was a lot for all of us to process. And now for us to kind of quote/unquote go back to the way things were I just don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I don’t think that we’re ever going to be back the way things were before COVID, and so that means a lot of changes within organizations and among employees and their understanding of work and how they approach it on a day-to-day basis. I think there’s going to have to be a lot of giving in, if you will for companies, that they’re going to have to take a brand new tack when it comes to hiring and retaining their employees.
But employees also need to kind of understand that at the end of the day there’s a job that needs to be done and sometimes the best way to go about doing that job is to maybe be in the office or be face to face. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Michael, great results. Were there any other things that popped out of the survey regarding developers and how they view work or work/life balance or salary or anything like that that you guys covered in this survey?
Davis: We didn’t really touch on salary so much. I think the big takeaway points were just how pervasive the impact was on developers and what they were trying to do. That was the first thing. The second thing then was this notion that a lot of that sort of stress and strain that was associated with this was, one, just a normal transition, but also this higher demand for software, which I don’t think necessarily any of us really predicted, and that is added to what’s already software in the world. Every company is a software company kind of thing, right? So that’s the challenge, and that’s the challenge that Rollbar and other companies are working to help this community with, because it’s tough. It’s a tough job.
O’Hanlon: Yeah. And to your point, I don’t think anybody expected it, but do you think that it’s going to be sustainable? I mean, is this something that’s going to be kind of the new normal, if you will? At least not may necessarily from a product – well, even from a productivity standpoint, but do you think the demand is going to remain as high as it has been over the last 18 months or so?
Davis: I just have no doubt about that. I mean, there was already an incredible pressure on the system. These teams are already feeling lots of external pressure about being able to deliver features and functionality faster, right? We’re all hearing about iteration speed. And so I don’t have any question now that – again, I think companies have learned that maybe they don’t need the same kind of retail presence to serve their customer base. Which again, puts just more pressure on the need for software.
So yeah, this all feeds into I think even a more challenging environment, but certainly a rewarding environment because these people are at the center of the epicenter right now of everything.
O’Hanlon: Yeah. But I do worry about burnout. I do worry about the fact that – I think a lot of people really rose to the occasion at the beginning of the pandemic and all throughout it because they did recognize that there was a value to it. They could actually see how their work was impacting their company. And I’m not sure that once we go back to kind of whatever, whatever we’re going to call it, that that is going to sustain, and it’s really going to give developers and other employees for that matter kind of the push that they need. And it does concern me that we may very well see mass burnout among developers, and that could be bad for everybody.
Davis: You’ve given me a great transition to one thing I wanted to mention, which is the next thing we’re going to be working on is some analysis around developer productivity. So I think you’re right on, spot on. I think that’s the next concern. I mean, it’s already a concern, but now it’s even more accentuated. DevOps was already a mixed bag in terms of developer productivity. I won’t spill anything, but we’re going to do a deep dive there and hopefully we’ll have some more great data for you.
O’Hanlon: Well, come back and have the conversation with me when that’s ready, because I would love to continue this conversation. There’s a lot going on in the space right now and it’s got so much more to do with just business, the business side of things. There’s a real human element to all of this and I think it’s very important that organizations keep that in mind at the end of the day and so much more. But Michael, thanks for talking to me about this survey and the results of this one.
Fascinating stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the year plays out in terms of everything that we’ve discussed today. So thanks again for your time. I appreciate you being here.
Davis: Thank you. Thanks for the chance to talk to you. Bye-bye.
O’Hanlon: Alright. Alright, everybody. Please stick around. We’ve got lots more TechStrong TV coming up, so stay tuned.
[End of Audio]
The pandemic brought unprecedented change to the digital ecosystem, impacting users, companies and software engineers alike. COVID-19 accelerated ongoing digital transformation and forced many organizations to innovate rapidly. Newfound reliance on digital experiences increased demand for software programmers, exacerbating demand in a market already short on talent. In this era, work-from-home (WFH) became commonplace and most engineers moved toward full-time remote work positions.
Having had a taste of freedom from corporate settings, most developers now want remote work options in a post-pandemic future. A significant amount also desires to work 100% remotely. As a result, many companies have instituted permanent work-from-home policies. Yet, they are still grappling with the repercussions of a fully remote workforce. For example, there are differences of opinion about whether to adopt location-based salary adjustments and whether or not those remote workers should be granted unique employee benefits.
The 2021 State of Remote Engineering Report, conducted by Terminal, surveyed 1,100 software engineers in North America and explores how the pandemic has affected the remote developer workforce; showcasing both the positive and negative effects of remote work on engineers. Interestingly, the report exposes international talent’s declining interest in physically moving to the U.S. as domestic conditions worsen and remote work becomes more globally accessible. Below, we’ll explore the key takeaways from the study to posit how this new normal is influencing the productivity, morale and recruitment of software engineers in North America.
The new normal has dramatically shifted the status quo. Impressively, findings show that 86% of engineers are currently working 100% remotely. This is in stark contrast to the pre-pandemic numbers, which showed 19% working remotely 100% of the time. Many of these employees prefer to keep these new working arrangements and standards in place going forward. The study found that 80% of engineers surveyed want options for working from both home and the office, and one out of three want to work remotely 100% of the time.
There are many reasons why engineers prefer the flexibility of remote work to the traditional workplace. For one, there is no need to commute, thus saving time and energy. Engineers also cite an improved work-life balance and appreciate the increased autonomy. It also appears that many organizations handled the shift to remote work effectively—74% of engineers say their companies adapted well to remote work. Due to these positive results, 76% of engineers would be happy working fully remote 60% of the time or more.
Remote work not only benefits software engineers but could also bring productivity enhancements to help achieve business goals. Without workplace distractions, 70% of engineers surveyed reported they are more productive when working from home. Yet, this new normal isn’t without its drawbacks. As the traditional corporate firewall diminishes, CISOs struggle with a dilemma: striking an ideal balance between granting new IT freedom and locking down systems and restricting access to adopt a zero-trust mindset.
Of course, there are some other drawbacks associated with full-time remote work. A lack of day-to-day interaction with coworkers is a challenge cited by 58% of participants in this study. For 39% of engineers, it’s harder to collaborate or feel part of a team in this new dynamic. Burnout or lack of motivation and home-based distractions can also be barriers for remote-working engineers. The loneliness of at-home work can take its toll; 38% say their mental health has gotten worse amid the pandemic.
Companies also face challenges recruiting within this new paradigm. The talent shortage remains a big issue for many companies trying to rapidly deliver new software; 64% of engineers say there is a software engineer shortage and 65% say this gap holds back technical development. Though there is a clear skills gap, most companies are not offering adequate benefits coverage to entice full-time workers. Of these benefits, 23% of engineers would like a home office stipend for utilities, internet and other expenses; 22% also want more flexible work hours and 11% desire new technology and productivity tools. And 26% of engineers also ranked support for mental health as one of their top three sought-after benefits.
The report also addresses some inefficiencies associated with hiring engineers for remote positions. For 59% of engineers surveyed, recruitment involves far too many interviews. Many of us working in IT can likely attest to being approached by LinkedIn scouts with irrelevant offers. As such, 40% of engineers say they are often interviewed by people who don’t understand the technology. Other recruitment issues include generic interviews and long delays, both of which could frustrate candidates. It appears companies must fix their hiring practices or risk losing potential talent.
If anything, the State of Remote Engineering report drives home the imperative to consider full-time remote work as a viable option for prospective hirees. To fill engineering labor shortages, some U.S.-based companies have historically flown in international talent. Yet, the desire to move to work in the U.S. is declining. In fact, 39% of engineers have no interest in moving to the U.S. for a job. Engineers cite crazy politics (56%), gun violence and safety concerns (55%), racism (47%) and mishandling of the coronavirus (51%) as reasons not to move to the U.S. The idea that employees must remain in physical proximity with a company’s headquarters is changing; thus, companies will have to go where the existing talent already lives.
In addition, today, engineers have more bargaining rights than they did in the past. “The era of employee choice is here,” said Clay Kellogg, CEO, Terminal. If we’re in a seller’s market, engineers are the ones to profit. Increased bargaining rights could mean remote engineers may demand equal pay, no matter their location. The study found that, on the whole, engineers are not in favor of location-based salaries; 49% say they would only accept a location-based salary if their cost of living dropped by 20%.
In addition to offering competitive wages, teams are finding creative ways to maintain culture and avoid burnout. For example, 55% of engineers think virtual get-togethers like happy hours and social activities help stave off burnout. With all these findings in mind, companies should consider instituting a work-from-anywhere policy wherever possible and provide additional benefits and support for remote workers to attract more engineering talent.
The State of Remote Engineering surveyed over one thousand software engineers across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. For more granular details, consider viewing the full report here.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a deep, irreversible change within work environments, as most organizations are reimagining this “new normal” with a combination of fully remote or hybrid work. DevOps practices are being increasingly normalized and relied upon to respond to the needs of modern, digitized companies. Coming out of the pandemic, organizations now better understand the need to efficiently deploy the software applications necessary to thrive in this new world of work.
This isn’t surprising given organizations have realized the value of DevOps to help product teams deliver quality code at a fast pace. DevOps enables them to be more agile and move more quickly to respond to evolving market changes and business demands. To maintain the speed of software delivery, product teams are integrating various tools within their CI/CD pipelines and minimizing tool citations and validations outside of their pipelines.
As the rate of change increases alongside these DevOps practices, automating compliance to enterprise security controls becomes more important than ever, especially given that security vulnerabilities in code and configurations present dire business risks. For DevOps to truly succeed, organizations need to modernize and automate security processes, making them an integral part of the DevOps build and delivery pipeline—readying the overall DevOps environment for DevSecOps.
But successful DevSecOps deployments depend heavily on the maturity of an organization’s current DevOps environment and security operations workflows. This includes prioritizing the core principles of automation, measurement and collaboration because these same principles also drive positive security outcomes. Referencing these principles, here are four best practices organizations should consider incorporating when evaluating how to mature their DevOps ecosystem and security operations processes to be ready for DevSecOps.
The first step in the journey prioritizes a “security-first” mindset and related skills for development teams. Security shouldn’t be an afterthought, and development teams shouldn’t rely on security teams to check vulnerabilities later in the life cycle. Instead, security experts need to become an integral part of the development phase so that the code accounts for security from the get-go.
This can be achieved either by moving responsibility for security skills into the development teams or by having the security team play an advisory role earlier in the life cycle. Development teams can then automate the necessary security vulnerability checks—like static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA) and dynamic application security testing (DAST). But more importantly, sharing insights and streamlining communication between development and security teams is crucial to ensure policies are working and are being consistently applied across the organization.
Puppet’s 2020 State of DevOps Report revealed that organizations have matured their DevOps environment by improving governance processes such as change management, preparing enterprise infrastructure and applications for organizational change. In fact, they found that organizations with automated change management and governance processes are nearly three times more likely to outperform competitors in DevOps transformations.
This is because automation improves change management processes, which in turn eliminates barriers to applying governance to DevOps. This is also backed by Puppet’s survey, which cited that automation makes organizations more confident that their change management solutions are effective. A comprehensive, automated change management process instills governance by applying policy-based rules to a code or configuration change before allowing it into production. It does this in real-time by leveraging data collected from the pipeline. When applied correctly, DevSecOps tools prevent vulnerabilities and automated change management conducts a ‘last mile’ check to ensure the correct scans were run and adhere to compliance policies.
Product teams—and all involved in the delivery of an application—should have an accessible audit trail, providing visibility into security checks, users, code and configuration changes, code quality, testing and more. This paints a clear picture of what happens to the software from ideation to production. In an ideal world, product teams include both operations and security personnel, but these functions often remain siloed in large organizations.
Companies can break down these silos and make it easier for teams to collaborate by centralizing visibility. Providing visibility and centralizing security policies makes it easy for teams to efficiently operate the delivery process of software since they are provided a single source of truth. Additionally, an automated system for gathering audit data improves the consistency and reliability of audit information. Automatically collecting data from the entire pipeline and eliminating the need for developers to enter information diminishes the likelihood of data anomalies—saving valuable time and resources.
Applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to DevSecOps processes helps organizations quickly identify and remediate security issues before they are manifested in production, enhancing proactive and actionable collaboration and coordination across product teams.
As Puppet cited in its 2019 State of DevOps Report, sharing and collaboration are two of the most impactful things teams can prioritize to improve DevOps initiatives, including DevSecOps, and this still holds true today. The 2020 survey results signaled how many more organizations are reaching this peak point of DevOps maturity.
Ultimately, we’re already seeing how operational activities—like checking software for security vulnerabilities—are moving into the DevOps pipeline and are being handled as “code.” But organizations should take this a step further by keeping in mind factors such as reliability, predictability, measurability and observability across DevOps deployments to foster more secure environments and pipelines.
