A survey of 600 software engineers and 600 senior technology leaders across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France finds that nearly three quarters of software engineers say demands on their time make it difficult for them to build new features.

Conducted by Chainguard, a provider of repositories for accessing secure container images, the survey also finds that 93% of engineers said they find writing code and building new features to be rewarding, but they spend only 16% of their week on this type of work. Just over a third (35%) also noted that excessive workload and burnout have become major obstacles to a positive work experience.

Additionally, only a third (33%) of software engineers strongly agreed that they spend the majority of their time on work that energizes them, even though 65% said that the majority of their organization’s common software engineering tasks are either mostly or fully automated. However, 62% also noted that their organization’s tools are not fully integrated into workflows.

Unfortunately, the survey also suggests the first wave of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is not yet having a major impact on productivity. While 89% of respondents reported AI saves them at least three hours per week, only 28% said they reclaim up to six hours.

Dustin Kirkland, senior vice president of engineering at Chainguard, said the survey makes it clear that the developer experience is suffering as a result of the friction that exists within DevOps workflows. A full 88% of respondents, for example, said switching between tools impacts their productivity, with 44% reporting significant loss of focus due to this context switching. While many low-level tasks have been automated, it’s clear that the level of integration that exists between tools is not all that high, added Kirkland.

Well over a third (38%) of engineers cited too many tedious tasks as a barrier to doing meaningful work, while 38% pointed to the ongoing demands of code maintenance, such as upgrades, patches, and vulnerability management as additional barriers. As a result, software engineers are not experiencing the level of joy that’s needed to keep them from burning out, said Kirkland.

The survey of IT leaders makes it clear that organizations are aware of these issues, with two-thirds (66%) reporting that they worry about retaining engineering talent. Two-thirds of all respondents (66%) said they frequently or very frequently encounter technical debt that affects their ability to deliver work effectively. Nearly half (49%) of all respondents agreed that tool-related issues contributed to a negative developer experience.

It’s not clear what impact AI might have on the developer experience, but as workflows become more automated in the forthcoming agentic era of AI, the overall developer experience should improve. The challenge is that in the short term many of the workflows that DevOps teams use today may be too fragmented to effectively automate, noted Kirkland.

In the meantime, however, it’s clear there is much room for software engineering improvement at a time when expectations about how quickly software can now be built and deployed have already risen sharply.