I recently read a report that Stripe released called The Developer Coefficient that asked both C-level executives and developers to identify the largest constraints to innovation. One of the main the takeaways that I came across is that executives worry more about finding skilled developers than they do capital, with 53% identifying access to software talent as a major constraint and 52% identifying capital.

If you dig a little deeper, there are some other interesting takeaways in the article.

Access to software talent isn’t the only problem. Both management and developers see huge gains to be made in productivity:

• 96%: the number of C-level executives that believe increasing developer productivity is high or medium priority.
• 68.4%: how productive on average developers believe they are as a whole, 100% being perfectly productive.

Per the report, “developers [are] force-multipliers: It’s not how many devs companies have; it’s how they’re being leveraged.”

I think many companies have incorrectly attributed their technology woes to a lack of developer talent.

Despite the efficiency impact, roughly 83% of C-level executives and 77% of developers are very or somewhat confident they have sufficient resources to keep up with new technology trends, like AI/ML, IoT, and blockchain.

And yet a whopping 44% of developers believe their company is too slow to react to tech trends.

Something doesn’t quite add up. Maybe companies need to innovate and react faster to new technology trends.

What do you think? Is software talent the biggest constraint to innovation?