Low-code could lead to improved job satisfaction for IT developers

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotic process automation (RPA) are putting increased pressure on IT developers who say that having access to faster and easier development tools can greatly improve their job satisfaction.

According to Appian's new Impact of low-code on IT satisfaction survey, IT developers believe that low-code technologies can help improve the worst aspects of their jobs while simultaneously supporting IT business goals for the coming year.

The survey revealed that the worst aspects of IT developers' jobs are time spent troubleshooting application issues, time constraints and deadline pressures, time wasted on repetitive coding tasks and a lack of opportunity to work on strategic projects.

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When asked about low-code development's ability to impact these areas of low IT satisfaction, 80 percent of the 150 IT leaders and 150 IT developers, engineers and architects surveyed agree that low-code is useful for automating repetitive development tasks such as coding forms and business rules.

At the same time, two thirds (68%) agree low code is viable for the development of mission-critical applications and nearly 80 percent believe it could help free up developer time to work on higher level-projects.

Increased pressure on IT developers

Emerging technologies are increasing pressure on the IT organization according to 86 percent of IT developers who feel overburdened by requests for new emerging technology applications and requests to integrate emerging technology with legacy systems and data.

IT developers said applications that improve the customer experience or increase customer engagement (68%), applications that optimize internal operations and processes (61%) and applications that enable innovation (57%) are the most in demand at their organizations.

However, while customer experience apps are the most requested, less than 50 percent of all respondents say their organization is extremely or very effective at integrating AI and RPA into customer service workflows. To make matters worse, IT developers say service reps must open an average of five screens to get a full view of the customer today.

The number one obstacle faced by organizations is developing more intuitive and user-friendly apps followed by ensuring data security and enabling the use of emerging technology for greater customer insights.

Appian's survey found that faster and easier development tools are the one thing that IT developers believe could help their organizations the most when developing applications which utilize emerging technologies.