Squandered IT developer time set to cost UK economy ?76 billion over the next decade

If businesses don’t better leverage their developers more effectively, British GDP could take a ?76 billion hit over the next 10 years—and ?2 trillion off global GDP in the same timeframe—according to new research released today by Stripe.

 

The research highlights the increasingly important role developers play in businesses’ ability to expand into new markets, innovate and scale, with business and tech leaders now ranking access to developer talent as a bigger constraint in their businesses’ ability to grow (53%) than access to capital (52%).

 

Despite this constraint, UK companies continue to squander this finite resource. Today, the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week focusing on maintenance and infrastructure issues, rather than tackling the strategic issues companies face in the digital age.

 

Nearly 7 in 10 of developers in the UK say that outdated technology systems are holding their businesses back

 

The report found that nearly 7 in 10 UK developers say that the businesses they work for can’t compete because of outdated technological infrastructure, with too much of their already limited developer time being allocated to patching old systems or fixing bad code.

 

This backlog of maintenance work, combined with a UK-wide developer shortage, means that UK companies are not able to invest time or resources into modernising or building innovative new technological infrastructure that would be far more beneficial for businesses in the long term.

UK suffers sharpest drop in developer talent globally, threatening the UK’s position as a global tech leader post-Brexit

 

Competition for developer talent is intense, with 68% of respondents stating that their company faces challenges in hiring developers. This problem is most pronounced in the UK, with respondents saying that the developer workforce at their companies has dropped by nearly a quarter (23%) over the last five years, the sharpest drop in comparison to the other countries surveyed.

 

This has seen the UK fall behind its global competitors in the average number of developers or software engineers at a company, with the US having on average 4 times as many software engineers in their business vs. UK-based companies.

 

Companies with executive tech leadership make better use of developer time

 

Part of the issue appears to be the ability for developers, and the business critical issues they face, to be heard at the decision makers’ table, particularly when businesses do not have tech expertise in the executive ranks. In fact, 75% agree that their companies’ leadership benches should place more weight on developer input when making strategic decisions.

 

Internationally, nearly half (48%) of developers say they have a great deal of influence in their companies when they have tech leadership, such as a CTO or CIO. However, in the UK, this drops to 37%, indicating that the strategic importance of developers and tech-focused staff to a company’s future is not being recognised at the highest levels.

 

This recognition becomes yet more important when considering that 55% of business leaders believe that they have made important strategic mistakes due to a lack of developer input in the past.

 

Iain McDougall Stripe’s UK Manager commented:

The role of technology within an organisation has changed significantly, going from a nice-to-have to now being a business-critical function. With 77% of UK businesses now considering themselves a technology company—no matter what industry they are in—developers have undeniably become some of the most important people in the building for any business.

 

And yet, as this research shows, barriers do currently exist in many businesses to how much time and freedom IT leaders and developers have to innovate in the face of aging infrastructure and a shrinking talent pool. If this issue were to be addressed, it has the potential to significantly benefit the UK, and world economy, and secure the UK’s position at the forefront of global tech innovation.

 

Change is on its way. As organisational barriers to developer empowerment slowly erode, and more developers begin to get a seat at the executive table, innovation and digitisation will become business as usual, and the UK will begin to reap the benefits of some of the ˆ2.5 trillion¹ gains that have been forecast as a result of digitisation across Europe.