Digital transformation is booming, but the digital skills gap has made it difficult for tech companies to keep up. Existing developers facing burnout as they are forced to pick up the slack.

Even though tech roles in the UK are nearly 80% higher than non-IT jobs, businesses still struggle to attract and retain talent due to a general gap in digital skills. 

Two million vacancies for tech jobs were advertised between May 2021 and 2022, and 72% of tech teams have a skills shortage. 

In Scotland, one in ten job vacancies are currently in the tech sector, making it all the more difficult to achieve the nation’s digital transformation goals. 

The difficulty has remained despite salaries increasing between 2021 and 2022: front end developer and DevOps engineer salaries both increased by 22% on average. 

However, despite this significant annual uplift in salaries, organisations are still struggling to recruit developers quickly enough as the digital skills shortage continues to bite. 

The difficulty in attracting fresh talent to their teams is piling on the pressure for existing developers, as their workload increases faster than the workforce can grow.

With “acting your wage” and “quiet quitting” on the rise in the tech industry, increased developer burnout can put digital transformation at increased risk. 

With Alphabet, Google’s parent company, calling on their workers to be more entrepreneurial or risk losing their job, and Musk calling on his Twitter employees to work even harder amid mass layoffs, developers may have simply had enough.

A higher wage might not be enough to continue attracting talent to these jobs in what could be regarded as a worker PR crisis among the largest tech companies in the world.

“Organisations need to do more than increase salaries if they are to reduce developer burnout, otherwise, they risk derailing their digital transformation journeys,” said Greg Adams, Regional Vice President, UK & Ireland, Dynatrace.

Dynatrace recommends that companies continue to automate as much of a developer’s work as possible to allow them to focus on tasks that matter. 

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“Augmenting developers’ skills with automation reduces the need for them to manually conduct routine, highly repetitive tasks in the delivery pipeline,” Adams explained. 

“This enables developer teams to focus on developing new features and services and ultimately speed up the delivery of innovation.”

Automation may be one solution to the digital skills gap crisis affecting the existing tech workforce, but this would also require skilled professionals to develop and maintain whatever automotive technology is introduced. 

As terms like “work life balance” permeate the tech industry, even this solution may not be enough to continually drive developers to take on the extra tasks necessary to maintain innovation amid the skills gap crisis. 

If higher wages are not working, then an increased reliance on technology which requires skilled tech workers may also not be enough to retain a skilled workforce. 

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