The Life of a Software Developer

Life as a software developer can be full of monotony and endless challenges. Companies want more and more code output and less time spent debugging, and then become frustrated when things take longer than they think they should. The issue with only focusing on efficiency is that software developers are slowly being treated like robots.

If we step back to evaluate how much time we spend doing things that aren’t always enjoyable, such as debugging, on-boarding, documentation, and code reviews, it’s clear that almost 50% of our time is spent not building new code. We would much rather be building new products and features. We didn’t sign up to only be digital janitors, authors, or even editors. We also want to be creators. Unlocking creativity allows developers to see new horizons, build new skills, and solve old challenges with new solutions.

We sometimes find that engineers are either feeling overwhelmed or maintaining the status quo— neither of which are conducive to producing good, efficient work. When engineers are overwhelmed, it usually means that there is a lack of planning or management of their work. They feel that work is consistently piling up with no way out. Meanwhile, engineers who are maintaining the status quo are doing just enough to get by. They aren’t pushing the boundaries because they feel like they won’t get recognized for it or, worse, they’ll be rebuked for trying.

We believe software developers should not only be more efficient, but also find more enjoyment in their work. It’s in everyone’s best interest—from the individual to the company level—to have employees who are content. In fact, an Oxford University study found that happier individuals are 13% more productive¹.

That’s why we created SourceField: To help developers find their efficiencies in order to free up time to challenge the status quo and remove themselves from the state of being overwhelmed.

In our next article, we’ll go into more detail about how Plumbr streamlines and enhances the code review process.

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1 - Does Employee Happiness have an Impact on Productivity?

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SourceField enables dev teams to know how risky a code change is, giving them the superpower to move fast and don't break things. SourceField's code intelligence platform analyzes your code changes, who & what is affected, and then highlights that on every Pull Request. If you’re ready to help build the developer tool of tomorrow, check out our open roles: https://www.sourcefield.io/job-listings.

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