MongoDB Finds Devs Held Back By Maintenance and Admin
Written by Janet Swift   
Wednesday, 07 February 2018

Research commissioned by MongoDB has revealed that while developers are recognised as the key drivers of enterprise innovation they are so heavily burdened with upkeep of infrastructure that their talents are wasted.

The study of 1,027 developers in the US, UK, India, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Italy and Germany was carried out by Stack Overflow in summer 2017. 

 

mongodbinnov

The majority (56%) of respondents believe that developers are the main drivers of innovation within organizations, outstripping executive management (30%), marketing (7%) and sales (7%) combined.

On the other hand the research revealed that challenges associated with developers’ working lives are limiting their opportunity to fulfill their innovative potential.

 

mongodbtime

 

Looking at the developer's working week it is  clear that maintenance and meetings are killing enterprise innovation: 41% of a developer’s time goes towards upkeep of infrastructure, instead of innovation or bringing new products to market. In addition, a fifth of their time (20%) is spent in meetings or doing administrative tasks.

Another pressure is that users now expect applications to feature integrations with third-party services to provide a richer, more complete experience. They require, for example, the ability to make payments through Stripe or PayPal, or to log in faster with Facebook ID and send text messages from within an app via Twilio. As a result 41% of a developer’s time building a new application is spent connecting managed services. The backend coding process to achieve this is not only tedious, it is done at the expense of creating the front-end user experience.

In his blog post reporting the survey findings, Andrew Morgan points to MongoDB Stich, a product we reported on at its launch last year. Morgan writes:

Stitch lets developers focus on building applications rather than on managing data manipulation code, service integration, or backend infrastructure. Whether you’re just starting up and want a fully managed backend as a service, or you’re part of an enterprise and want to expose existing MongoDB data to new applications, Stitch lets you focus on building the app users want, not on writing boilerplate backend logic.

Developers do their best to stretch their time; 58% of developers work more than eight hours a day, 32% work weekends and 23% fail to take their full allotted vacation days.

Commenting on the scenario revealed by the survey, Eliot Horowitz, CTO and cofounder of MongoDB said:

“Every business is turning to software for a competitive edge but these findings show a disconnect still exists between businesses and developers about the best approach. Developers drive innovation, bring new products to market and keep business agile, but only when they can devote their time to rapid iteration. If the technologies they are provided with are hindering their productivity and creating a large maintenance burden, developers are left coding with one hand behind their back.”

 

The survey also asked developers about their experiences with the cloud, resulting in some interesting insights:

  • Cloud wars:  Amazon Web Services (39%) is currently ahead of Microsoft Azure (19%) and Google Cloud Platform (13%) when it comes to where companies host their apps.

  • Reality check on cloud migration: L ess than half of today’s apps (45%) are developed primarily for the cloud. While 43% of the developers surveyed used cloud services and had expansion plans, 42% noted that security, privacy, or regulatory concerns were all hindrances to cloud migration. 

  • Benefits of Cloud-hosted DBaaS well understood: Well over half (60%) of the developers surveyed fully understand the cost benefits of cloud-hosted Database as a Service (DBaaS) in that you pay for what you use. Half (50%) noted that DBaaS results in increased developer productivity and a faster time to market.

Morgan refers to MongoDB Atlas, a fully-managed solution with best-in-class security, as MongoDB's answer to the cloud concerns raised by these findings.

More Information
Stack Overflow & MongoDB Research

MongoDB Stitch

MongoDB Atlas 

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 07 February 2018 )