Articles about observability

The developer talent gap is very real. According to IDC, there will be a global shortfall of four million developers by 2025. Other analyses are more dire, estimating the current shortage at 40 million developers worldwide and expected to reach more than 85 million by 2030.

While the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics currently indicates there are more than 1.6 million developers employed in the U.S., this number is expected to grow by 25 percent to more than two million by 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations. Despite this growth, developer demand is expected to exceed skills availability for many years to come. There are numerous causes for this, including the rapid growth of digital transformation, increasing software development complexity and more. But one thing is for certain - the fight for talent is going to be fierce, and it’s going to be essential for organizations to focus on keeping their developer talent happy and right where they are.

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In a lot of companies, observability or monitoring are words that only the technical groups understand. Perhaps the legal team is involved because there are SLAs that products must not breach, or it costs the company money in penalties. This is the wrong way to look at observability though -- it’s not simply a tool that verifies your application is performing properly and lets you avoid penalties. Instead, think of observability as a magnifying lens that helps all of the teams in your company understand how to increase revenue, by understanding the complexities of your product.

There are a couple of different ways to think of proper observability: It quantifies things that weren’t measurable previously. If something is measurable, it can be improved. Secondly, it’s a way to measure an entire, complex system -- both, portions which technology teams traditionally think about ("their code"), and third-party dependencies that no one thinks about until there are customer complaints.

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