Research Insights Made Simple #30: Developer Productivity for Humans

September 21 at 17:00 Moscow time (UTC+3). In this solo episode, I will bring together Google’s research series and my reviews of developer productivity.

Suppose builds are faster, AI writes more code, and activity charts are climbing. How do we tell whether the team finds it easier to deliver useful results? And has the work we saved simply moved to whoever now has to review it all?

What interests me about this series is the connection between technical conditions and human experience: speed, ease of work, and quality are considered together. In the episode, I will explore:

• How to choose metrics for a specific engineering goal and compare activity logs with developer surveys;
• What build waits, context switching, and onboarding tell us about working conditions;
• How to account for quality, technical debt, and colleagues’ contributions that are hard to see in the amount of new code;
• How AI changes the distribution of work across generation, verification, understanding a solution, and learning.

I will close with a proposed first-month plan for your team: choose one goal, understand the baseline, try one change, and examine its consequences. Start with a clear question you want to answer.

Join me if you lead engineering, build internal platforms, or want to understand whether new tools are helping your team. Bring your examples to the comments: what do you measure, and which questions do those numbers still leave unanswered?

#Management #Engineering #Metrics #DevEx #AI #Research