What Lies Ahead for Developers in 2021? Insights from 6 Experts

In 2020, the role of the developer emerged as central to business continuity and growth. As companies became more reliant on cloud-based software systems, developers had to help scale up digital infrastructure while maintaining security and functionality. Meanwhile, the shift to 100% remote work changed teamwork and collaboration dynamics for both. Interestingly, developers might be among the handful of roles that saw a productivity boost last year, with over half of respondents in a GitLab surveyOpens a new window reporting same or higher productivity when compared to pre-pandemic levels. 

Now, as we enter the new normal – marked by continuing remote work, an economic resurgence, and a slow but steady resumption of in-person interactions – how is the developer role poised to change? Will they remain central to companies’ continuing digital transformations, or will they take on new responsibilities as decision-makers, business strategists, and new-age collaborators? We reached out to experts from leading companies, including GitLab, Mattermost, InfluxData, JFrog, BMC, and Netdata to answer this question. 

Learn More: Role of DevOps and Automation in the Software-Defined Network  

1. Newfound Productivity and Normalization of Remote Work

According to Brendan O’LearyOpens a new window , senior developer evangelist at DevOps platform company GitLab, developers reached new heights in productivity over the last few months. “From 2020 through 2021, GitLab has found that developers are more productive in a remote work environment,” he said, sharing with us insights from GitLab’s research: 

• • Not only are developers more productive, but they are 23% more likely to have good insight into what colleagues are working on when working remotely.
  • All-remote teams are also 1.6x more likely to quantify and document their work than in-office teams, and operations professionals are 2.6x more likely to be given sufficient notice to support developers compared to their in-office peers.
  • Productivity doesn’t take a hit after all, with 65% of respondents saying remote work has either not impacted or only positively impacted their teamwork.

This newfound productivity potential will unlock a “larger seat at the table” for developers in 2021, says O’Leary, as they become more embedded in business schemes. All through, remote work will continue to help maintain their increased productivity levels. 

2. Validation and Setting an Example for the Enterprise

Corey HulenOpens a new window , founder and CTO of the developer-centric chat service provider, Mattermost, believes that the developers came into their own last year, as they were mostly equipped to shift to remote work. “The most interesting aspect to me is the validation that developer teams were the most prepared – across all functional areas – to deal with the sudden, and unexpected, shift to the way we needed to work.”

This is particularly true for the open-source community, which has always worked with technical talent worldwide, irrespective of time zones or geographical proximity. 

But this doesn’t mean that developers continued on a pre-pandemic normal track. Like all functions, Dev, too, underwent significant changes: 

• • Teams that hadn’t fully embraced concepts like DevOps, GitOps, agile development, and automation found themselves needing to play catchup. 
  • There was enormous pressure on DevOps and IT to keep the business running through the crisis. Quick fixes will need to be addressed with a more strategic perspective.

The developer practices are acting as a template for enabling remote collaboration across distributed teams. “Smart organizations took notice of developer expertise and best practices and applied them across the enterprise from running effective remote meetings to onboarding new employees, and even how to create custom emojis,” says Hulen. In a way, this has led to a breakdown of silos between technical and non-technical, with a spread of developer culture across business teams. 

Learn More: Mattermost Takes a Shot at DevOps Collaboration With New SaaS Tool 

3. New Tools, Collaboration Patterns and Changing Priorities

Rick SpencerOpens a new window , head of Platform for open-source database provider InfluxData, explained that the pandemic has led to a change in developers’ priorities, how they collaborate, and the tools they use to do so. 

“Teams now concentrate group meetings into an hour or two-block in the day to accommodate multiple time zones. Meetings have gotten more efficient, and developers have longer blocks of uninterrupted time before and after the meetings to focus on their work, thus producing better code faster,” he says, emphasizing how unnecessary meetings have become a thing of the past. 

Along with this, developers have moved from real-time collaboration tools that struggle to fit in colleagues across time-zones to asynchronous tools. “Developers have been forced to switch from whiteboards to asynchronous tools such as Google Docs and git-based RFC to collaborate.” This has the added advantage of maintaining version history and control, enabling better documentation. 

Finally, Spencer notes that developers are finding a new baseline in work-life balance. “Developers have also had to learn to juggle important “real life” priorities with job priorities. We have seen developers integrate breaks for things like exercise or childcare into their schedules, leading to healthier and happier developers. These habits and tools will continue to have a positive impact on their productivity even after returning to the office.”

4. Multiple Hats and Dev as a Business Critical Function

Like Hulen from Mattermost, Stephen ChinOpens a new window , VP of developer relations at the DevOps platform provider, JFrogOpens a new window , spoke about the evolution of the developer’s role and its increasingly business-critical nature. 

“Since COVID, the majority of organizations have had to abruptly shift their entire workforce to a remote work model. This has, in essence, forced every company to become a distributed development organization. As a result, employees have become dependent on proper and high-quality software tools to continue doing their job, regardless of their location,” Chin explains. The onus was on developer teams to ensure that software, tools, and systems remain up-to-date and secure 24/7, allowing the business to run smoothly. Any downtime would immediately bring work to a standstill for everyone. 

“The developer industry, as a consequence, has scaled fast and must withstand increased pressure. Moreover, their roles are growing. Now, developers are some of the leading decision-makers, game-changers and, ultimately, the backbone of any given organization.”

We asked Stephen where the DevOps function is headed in 2021. “Even in the unforeseeable future when the urgent COVID crisis has 100% passed, people will place more of a focus (including budgets, hiring, and management) on developer teams to support cloud-based systems with high-availability and low-maintenance tools so their business can continue to function at any time, no matter the circumstance,” he predicts. 

5. The Spotlight on DevOps to Meet Business Demands

Guy EdenOpens a new window , head of product, digital business automation at the enterprise software company BMC, spoke about two trends from last year that places the spotlight on DevOps: 

• • The first, driven primarily by remote work, is the increased use of automation. According to a recent EMA studyOpens a new window , 73% of companies are automating workflows. This technique (often referred to as Jobs-as-Code) involves automating and orchestrating complex, interdependent application workflows and data pipelines into DevOps processes during coding instead of incorporating them ad-hoc at the end of a release cycle. 
  • The second theme is a renewed focus on maintaining peak performance and efficiency of existing applications and data pipelines in production. To keep applications running while adding new capabilities, developers must understand traditional operational issues around change management, operational standards, and how changes affect existing workflow automation and orchestration running in production.  

Automating application workflows and maintaining efficiency in the production environment both require improved teamwork between dev and ops. “A shared focus on delivering better business outcomes faster is important, and ideally will continue beyond these challenging times,” Eden says. 

6. Automated Tools to Overcome Hiring Hurdles and Staffing Shortage

Costa TsaousisOpens a new window , founder and CEO of open-source performance monitoring tool, Netdata also spoke about automation – interestingly, he mentions that this will help teams overcome hiring challenges. “Many organizations already face challenges when hiring developers prior to the pandemic. The uncertainty caused by the pandemic created new problems, especially for smaller or resource-constrained organizations who have to compete for top talent, whether for full-stack developers, site reliability engineers, or other DevOps roles.”

Staffing shortage would lead to hiccups in the continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline, posing a very real material risk.  “Organizations have not only been forced to adapt to remote hiring constraints but are also facing economic uncertainty from the possibility of downstream financial impact,” Tsaousis observes. 

The deployment of next-gen monitoring and observation tools in the development process can offload some of the responsibility for infrastructure reliability and performance. This reduces the need for manual efforts and fresh hiring, which is a top priority for organizations right now. 

As Tsaousis puts it, 2021 will see the continued adoption of tools that are “auto-deployed, self-configuring, lightweight, and easy to use without sacrificing granularity and full visibility into their tech stacks.”

Learn More: Who’s Responsible for Data Protection in the WFH Era – IT or DevOps? 

Wrapping Up

There is no denying that the world as we know it has changed, and software apps will be central to our personal and professional workflows in 2021 and beyond. This places the DevOps function right in the driving seat. Leveraging new tools, new collaboration aids, and new productivity dynamics, developers are expected to power the future enterprise. In turn, organizations will reward Dev with an increasingly larger seat at the table and a significant role in decision-making.  

A big thank you to all our experts for sharing their insights. What are your thoughts on the future of Dev? Comment below or let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , LinkedInOpens a new window , and TwitterOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!