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The growing value of software developers

A new report claims that software developers are now more valuable to companies than money!

The findings, based on a survey carried out with 1,000 developers and 1,000 top level executives in the UK, US, Germany, Singapore and France, revealed that business leaders are actually more worried about a lack of access to enterprise software and developers than they are about funding.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that business owners and executives are struggling with delays to their overall digital transformation plans due to a lack of developer talent. And according to the Harris Poll and Stripe report ‘The Developer Coefficient’, 61% of business leaders cite this lack of access to developers as a significant threat to their firms. Significantly and perhaps surprisingly, this concern surpassed worries about a lack of access to capital…

The report also revealed just how much money organisations waste as a result of using developer talent in non-strategic areas of the enterprise. The figures show that software developers spend more than 17 hours every week on maintenance issues, such as debugging, with one quarter of that time spent on fixing bad code.

Nearly two thirds of developers surveyed agreed that the time they spend fixing bad code is excessive and had strong views that clearer prioritisation, responsibilities and long-term product goals would help to improve their own productivity.

The report also recommended a number of ways to increase the impact that developers can have on an organisation. These included:

  • Exploit the cloud – for every business function that’s not unique to your business, be it accounting, CRM or project management. This will allow you to use developers on higher-impact projects, working on what makes your business unique.
  • Have leaders with technical backgrounds – including software developers directly in strategic business decisions will ensure the right product roadmap and the most appropriate technology strategy for long-term success.

And finally, the report also found that four out of every five of those surveyed believed that using in-house developers is a more effective use of resources than hiring in consultants from outside the business. Little wonder, therefore, that most of the business leaders questioned (86%) confirmed that their number of software development professionals had increased in the past year.

Meanwhile, on the machine learning front, Microsoft has revealed that the latest additions to Azure ML will include enhanced integration with Python.

Python is proving extremely popular with developers as far as machine learning is concerned, not least because of its wide range of machine learning libraries and support tools. And this latest development will see a new SDK that enables Azure ML to connect to a developer’s existing Python environment.

The tools offered through the SDK include data preparation, logging the results of experiment runs, saving and retrieving experiment data from Azure blob storage and automatically distributing model training across multiple nodes.

Matt Barclay

Solutions Architect

The post The growing value of software developers appeared first on Global Knowledge UK Blog.


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