Scott Holmes’ Post

Nicole Forsgren and team today published an excellent study on productivity for software engineers in remote, hybrid, and in-office environments. One key quote: "Our analysis finds that those working entirely remotely report the highest level of productivity, followed by those working from a mix of home and office, and finally those working fully onsite report the lowest level of productivity." There are some nuances there, so it's worth looking at the whole report. But one key point is that if you're worried about whether software engineers can be productive in remote settings, I don't think that's something we need to keep worrying about. The study goes into the challenges that developers face with remote work, and which ones actually correlate with productivity. It also covers what motivates people to go into the office or not, what types of barriers developers are most frequently facing with getting work done in general, how remote-work policies influence employee retention, and what developers want from a remote development environment. Well worth reading, overall. https://lnkd.in/gtGD6umc #hybridworkplace #work #productivity #remotework

DevOps vs. SRE vs. Platform Engineering? The gaps might be smaller than you think We know Platform Engineering is huge. Just ask the 15k+ people who’ve registered for #PlatformCon 2023. But beyond the buzzwords, what actually is it? https://lnkd.in/dMkY8syH Like all good things in life, let’s start with DevOps We know the story. In 2006, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels changed everything when he described the company’s new approach to software engineering. “You build it, you run it.” In the dark days before, devs handed off their code to ops to run in production. Then, Amazon required devs to deploy and run their apps & services end to end. Thus DevOps was born. DevOps grew and evolved. Thought leaders stepped in and provided new metrics for orgs to gauge the success of their DevOps efforts Sounds great, right? Well, only for a select few We measured 1053 teams on their DORA metrics and how far they follow best practices, and scored them against these standards The result? Less than 25% of teams practicing DevOps could be considered "high performing". With smaller deployment frequencies, slower change lead time, higher change failure rate and with pretty shocking service production restoration times. For more detail: https://lnkd.in/dRyWf2QZ The numbers speak for themselves, few are living the true DevOps dream “DevOps Topologies” breaks it down best. As the role of the Dev grows bigger & bigger, the brunt of that falls on senior Devs Anti-patterns emerge, cognitive load goes up and efficiency & DX goes down Where does SRE play into all of this? Well, the SRE story is similar. Established by Google, the idea was sold to orgs as the dream culture to aspire to. Like DevOps, it was a much hyped cultural shift And like DevOps, it’s more dream than reality. Benjamin Treynor Sloss defines SREs as being responsible for the “availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning of their service(s).” SREs use service-level objectives & error budgets to establish shared expectations for performance, balance reliability & innovation Like DevOps, nothing is wrong with SRE in theory Done well SRE is 🔥 The problem is most orgs lack the resources & talent of Google, and so SRE isn't properly implemented and everyone suffers And so enters PE✨ PE is the discipline of designing & building toolchains & workflows that enable self-service capabilities for devs They build an Internal Developer Platform, which they treat like a product with their devs as their customer. Allowing for better dev self service, better devex, better productivity & better velocity. There’s a reason why PE is growing so much. And there is way way more to say about it than I could squeeze into this post👀 Make sure to check out PlaformCon if you're interested in topics like this!

Watch NBC Bay Area ‘s investigative segment tonight at 11 p.m. PST on how universities are dealing with student use of generative AI such as #ChatGPT on campus and in the classroom. Senior Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban interviewed Ethics Center Director of Internet Ethics Irina Raicu, Director of Technology Ethics Brian Green, and Santa Clara University students to learn more. Read more about the ethical impact of this technology on the Ethics Center's Spotlight on #generativeAI at https://lnkd.in/gGhdp9iy. #ethics, #aiethics, #highered

We’ve posted a deep dive into our investment thesis focused on DX and where we see opportunities for innovative companies to emerge. We believe the market for dev tools (and the underlying theme of improving the developer experience) is massive.  Every modern company is a software company in some capacity, and engineering productivity is a force multiplier in their innovation.  Product velocity makes for happier developers and is a catalyst for recruiting and retaining top tech talent.  Dev toil creates frustration and limits innovation. That’s why businesses are making significant investments in dev tooling and also explains the rise of the “developer experience” role at leading-edge companies.  Our team is excited to partner with the next generation of companies helping engineers minimize this toil and get back to innovating. To validate our hypothesis around this pain and need, we conducted over 30 interviews with thought leaders in the space.  We’ve shared key learnings from those conversations and our investment thesis in this post  https://bit.ly/devx_mv from Matt Murphy, Grace Ge and Katie Keller (with a cameo from one of our favorite founders Jyoti Bansal of Harness, who coined the phrase “dev toil”)  Special thanks to all who participated in our research panel for sharing your insights and expertise, including:   – Scott Holmes of Software Engineering and Developer Productivity at Coinbase – Chris Cholette, VP Productivity and Site Reliability Engineering at TripActions – Tara Hernandez, VP Developer Productivity at MongoDB - Mike O'Brien, of Sr. Director of Engineering at Flexport #developertools #developerexcperience  #developer #coding #devx #venturecapital #startups