Why Developer Productivity Engineering is Underrated

This article was originally published on igorvoloc.com I write about Developer Productivity Engineering — DX, AI-assisted dev, legacy migration, and business impact from the trenches. I tracked my own time for two weeks, logging each hour. The numbers were discouraging enough that I stopped. Most of what I called ‘development time’ was actually spent waiting, searching, context-switching, rerunning flaky tests, or digging through outdated documentation and message threads. This isn’t unique to me. It’s common, and most teams have come to accept it as normal. This invisible waste is what Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) aims to eliminate. There’s a deeper reason these problems persist: the people with the power to fund solutions almost never hear about them. Developers spot the slow builds, flaky pipelines, and broken docs immediately — but that pain rarely travels up the chain. Most engineers simply work around it, patching things locally or absorbing the friction as part of th