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Michael Birkel

Managing Partner, Zenon Investments GmbH

dad, tech-enthusiast, theoretical physicist and business-angel

Highlights

Oct 26 · linkedin

I wrote an essay about Gitpod’s purpose

Jun 28 · linkedin

Development environments are broken. The efficiency drag for engineering teams is staggering and costs an organization $912,000/ year - for every 100 engineers. Last week I ran a survey (n=64) during my ready-to-code talk at The Long Night of JetBrains in Munich with over 300 participants (thanks for the invitation Maxim Shafirov Mikhail Vink!). Below is a quick napkin calculation based on the results ↓

TL;DR: Per 100 engineers an average organization misses out on 8% of engineering capacity which is equivalent to $912,000 per year. Only due to development environment issues.

  • Based on the survey results (92% of respondents were individual developers) a developer spends ~ 2.2 hours per week (9.5 per month) managing and troubleshooting development environments. Acc to Kent Beck it's in the tens of percent of working time.
  • Assuming they work 40h per week and spend 65-75% of their time writing software (hi, Zoom) their effective development time is 28 hours per week. 2.2/28 = 8% capacity
  • Assuming a conservative cost estimate of $80 (incl. salary, taxes, bonuses etc.) per development hour organizations lose $760 (80*9.5) per developer - every month.

On-demand and pre-configured Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) change that → gitpod.io/cde and cdeuniverse.com

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Michael Birkel
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Experience

Managing Partner at Zenon Investments GmbH
Venture Partner at Target Partners

Education

PhD, University of Oxford
Diplom, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Location

Germany