In the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, we asked professional developers to tell us about what impacts their productivity at work, how often it happens, and how much time that takes out of their day.
More than 35,000 developers answered. Their responses can help the developer community start to quantify the impacts of the daily, invisible productivity frictions.
Quantifying productivity frictions is difficult. People know when their productivity takes a hit and what causes it. But those things are often invisible to managers and the company at large. How do you measure how many people in your organization encounter a knowledge silo or spend more than an hour a day trying to find a solution to a problem?
The productivity impacts of these things can add up. For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 333-651 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.
The responses from the 35,000 developers are a good starting point. With this large of a sample size, it's statistically likely that a similar percentage of people on your team feel the same.
With this in mind, we’ve made it easier for you to estimate the number of people on your team who are experiencing productivity challenges. We do this in a few ways...
First, we’ve provided three different estimation calculators for you to use, depending on how granular of an impact you’d like to estimate. You can download the Excel file here - the zip file will immediately download. You can see an overview of how to use these in the video below. *See the footnote for additional information about the Excel file.
Second, we’ve provided you with various data cuts of the 35,000 respondents so you can feel confident that the data in the calculator closely matches your team’s composition. Things like country location, years of experience, work environment, whether they are an independent contributor or manager, and the size of the company they work for.
Finally, we’ve provided you with the survey questions themselves if you want to survey your developers. You can plug those results into any of these calculators to estimate the number of people experiencing productivity frictions on your team.
We hope this is helpful. If you have any questions, reach out to us on the email provided in the Excel sheet.
* The Excel sheet does contain macros. We used this to build the table of contents. This is the macro we used. You can still use the calculator if you disable the macros. You’ll just see an error in the Table of Contents tab.
You can open this file in Google Sheets. The only thing that will break is the macro for building the Table of Contents tab - everything else will work as shown in the video.
Download the file
The file contains three different estimation calculators, multiple tables with different cuts of the survey data, and the survey questions themselves.
What to read next
