What Motivates—and Frustrates—Developers?

The prime motivators for developers, according to a recent survey from CAST, are pride in their craft and the ability to build something innovative, as well as compensation and career opportunities. Yet, the study, "2017 State of the Modern Developer," also reports that a majority of developers are aggravated by the inclination of managers to make key decisions without understanding the IT components involved. In addition, the report reveals that architecture issues have become a common management-caused frustration. On the other hand, the findings indicate that a lack of accountability with respect to developers' work may also cause problems, as few developers are evaluated on their code quality. And, if poor code quality leads to an IT outage, a significant number of developers face little or no job-related fallout. "Despite the regularity of IT outages caused by software, our survey findings indicate developers are not being held accountable for application stability," said Bill Curtis, senior vice president and chief scientist at CAST Research Labs, a division of CAST. "One takeaway for IT managers is clear: Elevate the importance of architectural and coding standards, and hold developers accountable for the quality of their code." An estimated 500 global developers took part in the research.