"Developerocracy" – A New Challenge for Scandinavia?

6 points by havkom 2 years ago | 3 comments

Over the past decade, I've observed a shift in many Scandinavian companies towards what I would call a "developerocracy." This represents a considerable departure from earlier times, where business needs drove most decisions. Today, developers often prioritize their personal interests over the business's desires.

This trend manifests in several ways:

1. Resistance to Business Requests: Developers often resist implementing features or solutions that don’t align with their personal interests or preferences. These requests get pushed to the bottom of the backlog. If the business insists, developers cite vague issues such as "incorrect requirements" or other questionable reasons. Tasks that diverge from their favorite tools or frameworks, or lack supporting tutorials, tend to be deprioritized further.

2. Inefficient Development Practices: The cost of developing features seems irrelevant to many developers. They frequently introduce unnecessary layers of abstraction, resulting in buggy, slow, and inflexible solutions.

3. Obstruction of External Solutions: When businesses seek to resolve issues by purchasing external products, developers often present a laundry list of reasons why these solutions are unfeasible. These objections are usually weak or fabricated, stemming from a perceived threat to their control. As a result, even if the Head of IT wishes to implement a solution, it gets stalled by developers who refuse to cooperate and face no repercussions for their obstruction.

I believe the following factors contribute to this situation:

1. A prolonged economic boom 2. Excessive job security 3. Diminished average competency as more individuals enter the field

What are your thoughts and experiences on this? Have you observed similar trends in your own environment?

almatabata 2 years ago |

I do not think this problem affects only Scandinavia. As developers we have the role of delivering a product that:

1. does its job well 2. delivered on time 3. under budget

A lot of developers get lost in over-optimizing point 1. It scratches their itch for the perfectly efficient system. They do not realize though that sometimes a "worse" system delivered on time will have more impact than a "better" system delivered late.

Some developers obviously let their need for fun overrule the need of the business. I would also blame the business side of companies as well because they often purposefully keep the developers in the dark around how the business side works. They simply throw features over and tell them to deliver it on time. they do not really attempt to get the developers to understand the market and the customers. However if you had more developers that understood the business they could push back on proposals from developers.

I feel though that the business side does not want this to happen because then the developers understand just how much value their contributions have. This would make it much easier for them to negotiate higher salaries if they know their last change saved the company 5 million dollars.

They would rather have inefficient drones that they can underpay and control then competent leaders that they cannot underpay and push around.

throwAGIway 2 years ago |

Yes, but entirely unrelated to Scandinavia.

hash07e 2 years ago |