When you really want to find out what makes someone tick, what do you do? Read their career history? Follow them around and see what they do all day, what soda they drink and what they shop for and how they like their coffee? Tally up all the insightful tech blogs posts they read? (Hint: your count is going up right now!) Why not just ask them? That’s what we do on a regular basis here at CloudBees. When we want to know the state of software development as a field we just start asking developers. This isn’t a Tuesday morning hallway conversation, though; there’s a little more science than that.
Why we listen
I’m Brian Nash (you can call me Nash, everyone else does) from the CloudBees Product Marketing team, and I spend about 5 hours per week in person or on a video chat with someone from the software development field. I want to know what they love about engineering solutions to the world’s next big problems, what gets them excited, and what makes their work rewarding. I want to know what bums them out, as well, and what sucks the wind out of their creative sails. Why do I think this matters? Well, partly it’s because one person’s frustrations are another person’s product opportunity if we can solve them or at least make them less dramatic. It’s also because I care about making an impact - because I know how much better our world gets when passionate clever people tackle big challenges and feel rewarded for doing so, and because I’ve been a developer myself and I know that feeling when it’s good, and it’s good. I want that for everyone.
These interactive interviews are part of a bigger effort at CloudBees to continually stay connected with the software developers our products are built by and for. We listen to our own teams, our customers, and even devs that don’t use our products, because all those perspectives are different and interesting. We gather feedback online and in-person, at events and conferences, in surveys and in the responses to this blog post (hint… ) about what would free up an engineer’s time to get back to coding, what would connect them better with their impact on customers, and what would help the rest of their business better see, use, appreciate, and find value from their talent.
What you are telling us
We are going to be sharing the results and the data with you here in more detail as these projects continue, but early results confirm that the software developer of 2019 wants more than anything to make an impact on the world , and that has us pretty excited as that’s what we want, too - to make a big impact and solve interesting problems. Those motivations have been cited 10 times as often as things like flexible work hours or financial rewards. That’s exactly the kind of community we want to support and supercharge because that really is how the world gets changed. That's it for now, but I'll be excited to share more details and insights with you as this work continues!
You’ll see more of the results from these kind of surveys here, or by following CloudBees on twitter .
We’re CloudBees, and we want to help you build stuff that matters .