Stack Overflow CEO: Focus on staff experience in 2023
Technologists are in the driver’s seat
Nearly three years on, the COVID-19 pandemic is still affecting people worldwide both personally and professionally – and the market for software developers has changed for good.
For years IT professionals in general, and developers in particular, were treated like insurance: you didn't really want it and didn't know what to do with it, but it was important to have. 2020 changed all that, says Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar.
"One of the biggest benefits [to the new way of working] is to make sure that they [business leaders] recognise the introverted engineer who's sitting in a different part of the world that's answering all the JavaScript questions in the company. Nobody knew about this person [before the pandemic]."
Stack Overflow has a vested interest in making sure IT pros are recognised: it is one of the world's most prominent Q&A websites for professional and amateur developers, and every year gathers massive amounts of data on the market from its 100,000+ users. That makes it much easier to spot trends than just chatting to your local IT guy or girl.
Supply-demand imbalance is still the number one IT trend
The first major trend Chandrasekar identifies as having defined recent years doesn't require oversight at Stack Overflow's level to see.
"The number one problem is around hiring, onboarding, reskilling people within companies," he says. "It's about retaining these people, because people are getting poached all over the place and it's very expensive."
Anyone who's tried to recruit in the IT space over the last decade, but especially the last three years, can relate. It's no longer enough to onboard someone and leave them to it; attracting tech talent now means more than providing a laptop and a desk.
"It comes down to having an amazing developer experience, which is around how do you hire, onboard, reskill and retain people, and how do you develop experiences made up of driving high levels of flexibility within your organisation?
"Number two, it's about productivity. Are you being constantly interrupted as a subject matter expert? Are you asking me the same questions over and over again, as new people come into your organisation and leave and so on? What tools are you using to be effective in your company?"
The final piece of the recruitment puzzle is development: that is, professional upskilling on the job. With technology moving so quickly, it's never been more important to give tech workers the space to grow and learn for themselves, even as the demands on their time have never been higher.
"This is a super critical one... There's a lot of expectations on developers and technologists to go and learn and execute on these big transformations; you know, unbundle the monolith, move to the cloud, all these sorts of topics. [At Stack Overflow] we carve out something called Learn, Share and Grow Days, where people have a protected time to go and just learn."
Gathering momentum driving towards tech transformation
Next up is the continuation of a trend that first appeared in 2020, when many companies went all-in on digital. IT teams gloried in their new-found importance and recognition, as their employers relied on them for more than just keeping the lights on - it was a fight for survival.
Three years later, the drive towards transformation still exists and is "even more on steroids." Companies see the value in IT investment beyond a strong security posture, and teams have a licence to work with modern tech like containers, machine learning and blockchain. Stack Overflow has seen a "huge increase" in interest in these technologies since the height of the pandemic.
"There's a lot of real momentum within companies on these topics beyond just ‘Let's just dabble in it'."
Power to the people
The massive shift of most office jobs to remote or hybrid environments has made managing distributed workers a challenge - one that is still to be solved to everyone's satisfaction.
Forcing everyone back to the office is certainly not the way to bring staff on-side, especially here in the UK: of the hundreds of UK developers Stack Overflow talked to last year, only 7% are being asked back to the office full-time, the lowest of any country worldwide. And remember the talent supply-demand issue we talked about earlier? Asking IT professionals to do something they don't want to do, now, is a shortcut to having no IT department.
"It's a developers' market, it's a technologists' market. They are in the driver's seat," says Chandrasekar, recalling Stack Overflow's data.
"We even saw, when people were interviewing for jobs, 30% of the people fell out of the interview process as soon as they found out about the tech stack the company was using. They said, ‘Oh, you're not using XYZ tool, I'm not interested in continuing the interview process', because it just felt like it was going to be a very difficult place for them to work, because they're not going to be very efficient and productive.
"It's quite fascinating to see how people are making decisions in a world where they have a lot of options. They are prioritising the developer experience: the productivity and opportunities to learn."
And that sums up how to attract talent in the new world: focus on the things you can control as a technology leader. Give your people the flexibility they need; make sure they're productive with the tools they want; and help them grasp the opportunity to grow.