69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)
Yep. If there is any company that knows what it takes to drive inefficiencies, it’s Atlassian. (Fuck them and their software.)
Now imagine solving that and becoming 25% more efficient, but still getting the same wage. (historically, the leadership rakes in all the profits without sharing when efficiency increases)
I’d rather be chill and blame some third party. Hail Atlassian.
Or, continue delivering at the same rate and spend 25% more time just chillin’
I’d rather be chill and blame some third party.
Can’t plausibly blame em if they solve the efficiency issue
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This email could’ve been a meeting, where you aren’t allowed to talk, and at the end we will finally get the task done… of scheduling an additional meeting! 🤝
Jira, where productivity goes to die
How many of those 8 hours are because bit bucket is down? I’d bet at least 1. I swear their uptime is measured in 8s instead of 9s (as in 88.88, not 99.88)
“You can save 20% time by using Robo for automation!” Click. Can’t even automate what I do.
The problem is that it’s not just software. Shareholders and corporate “leadership” have collectively decided that they are willing to sacrifice any and all future success in order to make stock prices go up today. They don’t know where the business will be in five years and frankly, they don’t care. Virtually all of the big names have completely stopped innovating. Cramming “AI” into their shitty products and trying really hard to pretend that’s it’s something different or “new” when it’s just the same shit but with more bloatware.
Manufacturing isn’t much different. I worked at a specialized industrial tool manufacturer for a few years. They were trying to add a new “smart tool” line and demoed it at an international trade show only to get completely excoriated by their customers who were all like, “Don’t even talk to me about ‘smart’ tools when the [very expensive] tools you already produce don’t fucking work.” But that’s how it goes when your business is built on acquisitions and the way you make your stock price go up is by coasting on your brand portfolios past success while simultaneously eliminating the people who made that success possible.
Instead, most organisations don’t tackle technical debt until it causes an operational meltdown. At that point, they end up allocating 30–40% of their budget to massive emergency transformation programmes—double the recommended preventive investment.
I can very much relate to this statement. Many contracts I’ve worked on in the last few years, have been transformation programmes, where an existing product is rewritten and replatformed, often because of the level of tech debt in the legacy system.
Great read, all entirely valid points, 0 chance of it reversing the trend. As an industry, we have given up on quality, and we aren’t going back.
Great analysis / report. At times a bit repetitive, but that could be useful for people skimming or jumping or quoting as well.
Despite 91% of CTOs citing technical debt as their biggest challenge, it doesn’t make the top five priorities in any major CIO survey from 2022–2024.
Sad. Tragic.
I’m lucky to be in a good, small company with a good, reasonable customer, where I naturally had and grew into having the freedom and autonomy to decide on things. The customer sets priorities, but I set mine as well, and tackle what’s appropriate or reasonable/acceptable. Both the customer and I have the same goals after all, and we both know it and collaborate.
Of course, that doesn’t help me as a user when I use other software.
Reading made me think of the recent EU digital regulations. Requiring due diligence, security practices, and transparency. It’s certainly a necessary and good step in the right direction to break away from the endless chase away from quality, diligence, and intransparency.
I examined CIO priority surveys from 2022–2024 across multiple sources. Here’s what consistently makes executives’ top 5 priorities:
Cybersecurity
AI/GenAI adoption
Digital transformation
Cloud migration
Cost optimisationI like how those points exclude each other and are also buzzwords.
those points exclude each other
It’s from the survey data, not just one person 😅
69% of developers report losing 8+ hours weekly to inefficiencies—20% of their time (Atlassian, 2024)
You know how “agile” was a hit with managers, mostly because the word represents something to strive for in their eyes?
What if we gave “no meetings, only messages” a fancy name? They do want to increase productivity too after all.
It’s not just the name, managers like agile because it gives them lots of meetings to attend with different names, so they look busy, and have a lot to yap about to thier higher ups.
This industry is completely screwed. The MBAs have successfully taken over the industry and turned it to shit. There’s no respect for craftsmanship, no respect for deep work, and a constant push to reduce labor costs.
I have been in the industry for 20 years and if I could leave tomorrow, I would.
Where do you live/what do you work with? I must say that for my customers - developing a secure, accessible and high quality product is what you have to deliver. They will not accept anything less. This is fantastic for me as a developer, product owner and CTO. We spend a lot of time refactoring and creating a great and bug free experience for our customers and their customers. 100% respect for craftsmanship.
I work at a large publicly traded company. We don’t polish software. We get whatever was needed for profits this quarter and then move on to the thing for next quarter. It’s hard to care when they don’t give you enough time to care
Same. I try to do my best with the time given to me, but there’s only so much you can do when deadlines are constantly being pushed on you. And when you’re done you just get moved to another project. Fast forward some months, they need changes done to the previous project and it takes longer than it should because there was no time to make it right.
More succinctly: in the vast majority of cases, just-in-time spirals into too late and not enough due to material and consistent lack of investment.
