Toil Takes its Toll: Developer Burnout is Straining Organizational Resources, According to New Harness Report

In its State of the Developer Experience 2024 report, Harness reveals the true impact of toil and developer burnout, at a time when resources are scarce and efficiency is critical

SAN FRANCISCO, May 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Harness, the Modern Software Delivery Platform® company, today released its State of the Developer Experience 2024 report, calling attention to the burnout epidemic plaguing developers' work-life balance while straining organizational resources.

Harness's survey of 500 engineering leaders and practitioners found that developer burnout is rampant within the tech industry. This leads to poor work-life balance and attrition, contributing to the estimated $300 billion yearly cost that impacts employers. The report highlights the various obstacles developers encounter in their day-to-day workflows, including deployment inefficiencies, manual processes, and scope creep.

Key findings include:

Relentless workloads lead to burnout and are the primary reason most developers quit.

• More than half (52%) of developers attribute burnout as a primary reason for their peers leaving their jobs, signaling widespread concern.
• Nearly a quarter of engineers are dealing with long hours: 23% of developers reported working overtime for at least 10 days a month, indicating a systemic issue within organizations.
• Nearly two-thirds (62%) of developers have experienced scope creep with expanding requirements, which means they are taking on more with less confidence to execute.
• New hires aren't helping immediately because onboarding takes at least two months, according to 71% of respondents--creating more work in the short term.

Toil – the prevalence of manual, repetitive tasks – is the main contributing factor to developer burnout and is compounded by stress about risk of failure.

• Nearly half of developers say they can't release code to production without risking failures, while 39% say their code fails to push to production at least half the time.
• When that code needs to be rolled back, an astounding 67% of developers do so manually.
• This leads to a broad sense amongst 42% of the developer community that deploying code isn't fast or efficient.

In response to its findings, Harness advocates for development modernization initiatives aimed at reducing developer toil. By leveraging automation and intelligent technologies, organizations can achieve a 37% improvement in productivity, translating to 740,000 hours of reclaimed work annually for every 1,000 developers.

"I talk to hundreds of developers a month, and one theme constantly shines through: They're all just trying to keep their heads above water, to hit their deadlines, and generally manage a massive workload," said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and co-founder of Harness. "But their productivity isn't matching their activity levels. Our research shows that devs are wasting a ton of time due to toil, which kills their productivity, and it's up to leadership to fix it. For my fellow CEOs, there's a crystal clear imperative here: If you can reduce toil, you can reduce burnout, which in turn positively impacts your bottom line."

To download the full State of the Developer Experience 2024 report, please visit harness.io/state-of-developer-experience. To learn more about Harness, please visit www.harness.io.

About Harness
Harness is the leading end-to-end platform for complete software delivery. It provides a simple, safe, and secure way for engineering and DevOps teams to release applications into production. Harness uses AI and machine learning to monitor the quality of deployments and automatically roll back failed ones, saving time and reducing the need for custom scripting and manual oversight, giving engineers their nights and weekends back. Harness customers accelerate deployments by up to 75%, reduce infrastructure costs by up to 60%, and decrease lead time for changes by up to 90%. Harness is based in San Francisco.