Software Developers Are More Valuable Than Actual Money for Companies: Report

The scarcity of IT developers and software engineers might be the biggest threat faced by companies these days, even bigger than lack of funding.

According to a recent research from Stripe and Harris Poll, about 61 percent top C-level executives believe that access to software development talent is highly valuable, and directly relates to the success of their companies.

Senior executives believe that the lack of quality developer talent is one of the biggest potential threats to their growth. Yet even though demand for high-quality software engineers is at an all-time high, they aren’t being deployed toward the most impactful projects that move businesses forward.

Even so, this very resource pool is more than often misused by companies that incur heavy expenses every year to support legacy computing and bad software. According to reports, the collective expense is somewhere around $300 billion, it’s spent mostly by developers to handle patchwork, while $85 billion of it is spent to fix bad code.

$3 Trillion Global Savings

These days, most companies are getting digitally transformed, and aim to have a presence in the technological sector. A talented developer pool is almost necessary for their chance to succeed. In this sector, new ideas, products, and connections are crucial factors for a company to thrive, and only a viable set of developers can allow access to these resources.

It also falls on the executives to correctly allocate their developer team. If handled unevenly, it can cause heavy “technological expenses” overall. Over the next decade, expert software developers could add about $3 trillion to worldwide GDP if companies learn to manage their expenses in a better way.

Here’s the complete research from Stripe and Harris Poll, titled the Developer Coefficient:
a $300B opportunity for businesses.