Buliding for the 99% developers
https://future.com/software-development-building-for-99-developers
The common theme in these conversations, even bigger than the need for the product we were building, was an overarching need that is currently underserved: building for real developers, or what I like to call the 99% Developers.
These are developers who are getting work done outside of the hip companies and frameworks, who often get neglected in conversations about “what developers want.” There’s a huge gap between what “developer-influencers” are talking about, and the daily reality of most developers.
“Trickle-down” tooling is aspirational, There is no gold standard development environment
A FAANG-like company is different from an SMB or your typical Fortune 500 company along many dimensions, including scale needs, stance on building vs. buying, and makeup of the engineering team. A small number of large, well-capitalized companies have entire teams with world experts dedicated to observability, testing, developer productivity, and more. On top of this, it’s worth noting that FAANGs are optimizing around a small set of products that are digital from the start, something that’s not true of most software shops out there.
Many non-FAANG teams have a small non-expert team, or even a fraction of a non-expert engineer, to do things that FAANG-like companies have multiple teams of experts to do. These organizations rely primarily on external tools and services that they have little bandwidth for customizing.
The goal is progress, not perfection
Today, the mismatch between where “real developer” teams are and the mainstream advice given out means that many teams don’t know where to start when it comes to improving code quality or system reliability. For the 99% Developer, most of their code will never need to scale to an organization of thousands, or to billions of users. Many of these developers work on code bases older than the length of their entire careers. Most of these organizations don’t have dedicated developer tools or developer-productivity teams internally.
Pristine code is not the goal — rather, the goal is code that is as reliable and secure as it makes sense to be, given other constraints.
Heterogeneity is here to stay
I’ve encountered so many teams who say that migration will happen “next quarter.” The reality is that, even when they manage to finally start, migrations have become continuous, rather than discrete, processes. A 99% Developer team with legacy code and a lean team is probably never going to convert their entire code base over to microservices or GraphQL. For most organizations, tech stacks and tool chains are heterogeneous, a combination of the layers of languages, frameworks, and tools that have been picked up over the years.