Top 10 Things That Kill Developer Productivity

This week’s Sketch Top Ten explores developer productivity. Why can’t we just get that feature out the door already? Here are ten reasons why:

10. Monitors under 22 inches. Has anyone ever heard this expression? “Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that somewhere before.

9. Meetings that should be emails. After the meeting about the other meetings we need to schedule, we should have a meeting about how to stop having all these meetings.

8. The smell of freshly popped popcorn. Do you believe in the inverse relationship between skill and ability to focus?

7. The smell of freshly burnt popcorn. I’m not allowed to use the microwave anymore.

6. “Are you done yet?” I would be closer to done if I didn’t have to keep answering that question.

5. Emails that should be meetings. Why are all these stories just an email that was copied and pasted three times removed from anyone who knows anything about what this app is supposed to do? Maybe we should have a conversation about this.

4. Silos. But it would be so much more efficient to have all the DBAs in one team, and all the front end developers in another team, and put QA in a separate area…

3. All these logins. I can get to work as soon as I log into my Mac and get logged into Citrix. Oh wait, let me just log into AWS real quick. And GitHub. And Slack. And for some reason I got logged out of Office 365. So if I can find that password, and my Jira password, I can get to work. And the intranet. And MailChimp.

2. Stand up meetings that never end. I’d like to give my update to the team, but the ScrumMaster is still taking notes.

And the number one thing that kills developer productivity…

1. No local admin rights. What do you mean I can’t run a server on my local machine? I develop web apps.