The Case for Investing in Developer Experience

There’s a common pattern I’ve seen across engineering organizations: developer tooling is treated as an afterthought. Teams build features for customers but neglect the tools their own engineers use every day. I think this is a mistake.

The hidden cost of friction

Every time a developer waits for a slow build, fights a flaky test, or navigates a confusing deployment process, that’s time and focus lost. These costs compound. A 30-second delay in a feedback loop might not seem like much, but multiply it across dozens of engineers and hundreds of iterations per day, and it adds up to something significant.

More importantly, friction erodes morale. Engineers who spend their days fighting tooling instead of solving problems burn out faster and produce worse work.

Tooling as a product

The shift happens when you start treating internal tooling the same way you’d treat a customer-facing product. That means talking to your users (other engineers), understanding their pain points, and iterating on solutions.

It doesn’t require a massive investment. Sometimes it’s as simple as:

• Writing clear documentation for a deployment process
• Adding a single CLI command that automates a five-step manual workflow
• Setting up proper error messages instead of cryptic stack traces

Measuring impact

The tricky part is that developer experience improvements are hard to measure directly. You won’t see them in a revenue dashboard. But you can track proxy metrics: build times, deployment frequency, time to first commit for new hires, and developer satisfaction surveys.

In my experience, the teams that take developer experience seriously ship faster, onboard new members more quickly, and maintain higher code quality over time. It’s one of those investments that pays for itself many times over.