Are Only 20% of Devs Happy? | Stack Overflow’s Erin Yepis
The 2025 Engineering Benchmarks, Forking Flutter, and more.
This week, Dev Interrupted dives into the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, revealing a surprising statistic: only 1 in 5 developers are happy in their jobs.
Stack Overflow's Senior Analyst of Market Research and Insights, Erin Yepis, joins host Ben Lloyd Pearson to discuss the survey's findings and explore the reasons behind this widespread dissatisfaction. From salary woes and workplace settings to the ever-present burden of technical debt, they dissect the factors impacting developer happiness.
Later, Dan Lines offers his perspective, drawing on LinearB's data to pinpoint three key challenges to developer satisfaction. He also shares valuable strategies for tackling technical debt, a growing concern as more companies transform into software-driven businesses.
I like the idea of using this data to explore the why rather than focusing on the overall number… There are some types of people that see that number and it's a confirmation bias. Like, of course, everything is terrible. But that's not the reason to ask about this and to quantify it. The reason to ask and quantify it is to find out why and to do something with that information.
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. The 2025 Engineering Benchmarks Report is Here ✏️
Does ignoring Jira increase developer velocity? Technically speaking, yes, but at the risk of negatively impacting project planning.
LinearB’s 2025 Engineering Benchmarks Report is out today and it’s packed with insights and data about the practices of elite engineering teams. The report dives into correlations between efficiency and quality, how bots are taking over your codebase (and your developers are ignoring them), and much more.
If you want to get your hands on the report before everyone else, sign up for the roundtable discussion this week with developer productivity experts from CircleCI and MongoDB. Event registrants get the 2025 Engineering Benchmarks Reports delivered instantly to their email inboxes.
Get your copy: 2025 Engineering Benchmarks Insights
2. Work Change Snapshot ⏯️
Is it just us or is everything moving a little too fast these days?
At the risk of totally overloading this newsletter with survey data, we think you’ll appreciate the insights found in LinkedIn’s most recent Work Change Snapshot.
Good to know it’s not just us who thinks the world is moving too fast. Can we all agree to hit the pause button for awhile? Maybe just a day? No?
Read: Business leaders and professionals agree – work is changing. Here’s how.
3. Stick a fork in it 🍴
“That's 50 people serving the needs of 1,000,000.”
Talk about a rough group project…
The creators of Flock, a new fork of the popular Flutter UI toolkit, believe that Google's focus on AI has led to a labor shortage within the Flutter team, causing slow development and neglected bug fixes. Flock aims to address these issues by creating a community-driven project with faster review times and a more supportive environment for contributors.
Read: We're forking Flutter. This is why.
2025 Engineering Benchmarks Insights (sponsored)
Level up your engineering team's performance in 2025.
LinearB's latest Engineering Benchmarks Report – analyzing over 6 million pull requests from 3,000 organizations worldwide – reveals the ins-and-outs of the software industry’s most successful teams.
Insights from this year’s report focus on Developer Productivity and Developer Experience.
Join industry leaders for a roundtable discussion on November 20th and learn how to improve your team's DORA metrics, pull request workflows, and predictability.
Register today for the event and receive a free copy of the report!
4. It’s time to start complaining…
We've been talking about the decline in developer happiness for a while now.
In fact, last year we interviewed Justin Reock about what he called Developer Productivity Engineering, which he defined as sort of confluence between developer experience, productivity, and joy.
Upcoming Events (this week!)
Virtual event: 2025 Engineering Benchmarks Insights
Register for this virtual event and be the first to explore the Developer Productivity and Experience insights from the 2025 Software Engineering Benchmarks Report.
Session Times:
11am ET on November 20, 2024
11am GMT on November 21, 2024