Imagine you own a restaurant.
Your chefs are world-class, but the knives are dull, the kitchen layout is chaotic, and every ingredient is stored in a different room. They’ll still make great food… for a while. Then they’ll burn out, or worse, leave for another restaurant where the knives are sharp.
That’s what bad Developer Experience (DX) feels like. The food (product) might still come out, but the kitchen (engineering org) slowly loses its soul.
So, what actually is DX?
According to getdx.com, Developer Experience isn’t just about fancy IDEs or swag. It’s about the conditions under which developers build, every touchpoint between “I have an idea” and “it’s live.”
They define three pillars:
- Feedback loops: Organizations should identify where feedback loops can be accelerated, whether that’s build and test processes, code review workflows, or deployment pipelines.
- Cognitive load: Software development is inherently complex, but unnecessary complexity kills productivity and satisfaction. Cognitive load is the mental effort required for a developer to complete their work.
- Flow state: Flow state is where developers do their best work. Those rare hours of deep focus when tough problems finally click. But modern work culture kills it with meetings, pings, and shifting priorities.
Teams that protect flow produce better code, faster and feel far more fulfilled doing it.
When any of these break, velocity drops and frustration spikes, quietly but inevitably.
Why businesses finally care about DX
Wealthsimple treated their internal developer platform as a product. They held weekly feedback sessions with engineers and built tools to reduce repetitive setup pain. The results were dramatic: they moved model deployment from months to days, freeing engineers to focus on building rather than battling pipelines.
That improvement wasn’t just a metric. Studies show that even a 1‑point improvement in DX score can save about 13 minutes per developer per week. Multiply that across 100 engineers and 52 weeks, and you’re looking at over 1,100 hours a year. Nearly half an engineer‑year reclaimed— just by removing friction.
The little things that change everything
Improving DX isn’t always a grand, top-down project. Sometimes, it’s the smallest changes that add up to real impact.
In one of my previous projects, local development was a nightmare. Everyone had their own scripts to spin up services or seed test data. It worked, but each dev was reinventing the wheel quietly, in their corner.
One day, we decided to surface all those private hacks in a meeting. Turns out, between eight of us, we’d already built 80% of what could’ve been a unified internal dev CLI. A week later, we packaged it and suddenly, new developers could get a full environment running with a single command.
The result?
Local setup dropped from hours to minutes.
Onboarding felt less like a rite of passage.
People started sharing their improvements instead of hoarding them.
That’s DX in action— nothing “fancy,” just frictionless.
DX is culture, not a tool
The biggest mistake leaders make is thinking DX is something you can buy— it’s not. It’s built day by day, through how teams document, share, and automate their pain away.
Every commit, every script, every small fix that makes life easier for others.
That’s Developer Experience. It’s what turns engineers from problem solvers into system thinkers.
Final reflection
If User Experience (UX) wins customers, then Developer Experience (DX) keeps the people who build for them. Developer Experience isn’t an expense; it’s how you keep great engineers from walking out the door. Start small, one shared tool, one thoughtful improvement at a time.
So, in the next sprint, ask your team:
“What slows us down that we don't need to?”
You might find that your sharpest knife is already in someone’s drawer.
Reflection for readers
What’s one small thing in your team’s developer workflow that everyone complains about but no one’s fixed yet?
That’s where your next DX win is hiding.
Original Article at LinkedIn
