The challenges modern developers face

Every company employee faces challenges. Some are inundated with too much work. Some of the work itself can be challenging. And there are times when home life and professional life intersect to bring productivity to a screeching halt. Or maybe you're in management and your duty is to get as much productivity as possible.

These daily challenges do not exclude anyone from the company. However, developers face a number of daily challenges that most other employees never have to deal with. If you live in an isolated management or ownership environment, you may be completely unaware of these challenges. When that veil between you and your developer teams is lifted, you can gain a whole new level of respect for these employees.

But what are the challenges modern developers face? While some may be the same issues that developers of previous generations had to face, some are quite new. Let's take a look at some of these obstacles (old and new), so you can better understand the pressure your software engineers face on a daily basis.

The constant revolving door of tasks

Have you ever taken a look at a large project Kanban board for developers? One quick look and you will immediately understand why developers can get bored very quickly. A large project can have thousands of tasks, all interconnected and dependent on each other. If one of these tasks is not completed, numerous other tasks may be put on hold.

But the issue is not the interconnectedness or the number of tasks in a project, but the fact that the tasks are never finished. As soon as a big project is completed, it's on to the next one. There is no pause, no change of pace or practice. It's just bam, bam, bam, one task after another and it never ends.

That's a perfect recipe for burnout.

Lack of organization

All these tasks, projects and teams need to be organized. And given how many moving parts a single project can have, without proper organization, what could be a well-oiled machine quickly stumbles and falls apart.

When a lack of organization is the norm for your teams, very little can be done. To make matters more difficult, a solid organization cannot be run by a single manager with a clipboard or spreadsheet. Your teams need the right tools to keep moving forward. These tools could be Kanban or Scrum (or some hybrid tool). No matter which path you take, you should consider organization an absolute necessity.

Increasing complexity

With each passing quarter everything becomes more complex. From technology, projects, demand, supply chains, pipelines and team management, there is never any escape from increasing complexity.

This complexity is fueled by almost ridiculous competition between companies. With more and more companies emerging, the struggle to get the attention of consumers, customers and clients becomes increasingly complicated.

So it's not just the technology that's harder, it's the way the technology is used. You have artificial intelligence working with big data to help make business decisions and predict trends. You have containers and Kubernetes to deploy and orchestrate application availability and scaling. There are DevOps, AIOps, DevSecOps, IaaS, SaaS and hybrid clouds. All of this creates a very challenging scenario for developers to work with.

CI/CD

Just look at CI/CD to see how challenging the role of the developer has become. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, which aims to become more efficient and reliable than any developer (or team of developers) can be.

CI/CD employs several very complex technologies to automate the building, testing, and deployment of applications. Sounds great, doesn't it? That's it. It's also incredibly challenging to get it up and running. Once you install CI/CD, everything will run smoothly, but it also means your developers will be in a constant state of updating the code stored in the CI/CD repository.

Automation

CI/CD is not the only area where automation has become crucial for companies. There is hardly an area that automation has not touched on companies. Not only is this automation challenging to get right, it also needs to be carefully monitored to ensure it is working as expected. At the same time, your developers will likely have to improve how the automation works and add new features as needed.

And automation requires heavy use of algorithms and a host of back-end technologies that can make any project exponentially more efficient and complicated.

The Threat of Downtime

Downtime. Two syllables that inspire fear in anyone in the IT field. And developers are not immune to this ever-present threat, as they are responsible for creating reliable applications and services. The looming presence of downtime is a huge challenge because when things go down, business grinds to a halt.

And when downtime happens, the culprits are pointed out. Inevitably, those fingers will be directed at developers. This leads to enormous pressure to provide applications and services that don't crash. The enormity of such a challenge cannot be overstated.

Shiny new technology

There's always some shiny new technology that those at the top of the food chain want to try. A CEO may have heard about some new technology from another CEO and wants to implement it immediately. The responsibility for this does not just fall on the operations team, but also on the developers.

Sometimes this brand-new technology is very easy to integrate, and sometimes the challenges of making it work can be insurmountable. And yet, the CEO wants it to happen.

Conclusion

Your developers are under constant pressure to deliver. The challenges they face should never be taken lightly, especially if you want them to work at the highest levels of productivity possible. When you find these developers are struggling with a wall of challenges, make sure you give them the help they need to avoid a burnt out team heading for the door.