Enterprises rely on technology today more than ever, making developers and engineers a hot commodity. In the hunt to retain skilled IT workers and add value to the enterprise, honing the developer experience is critical.
JPMorgan Chase is working to enhance several aspects of the developer experience, including tooling, culture and ease of collaboration. As engineers operate in complex tech stacks, the financial institution has also emphasized the value of simplification.
“We expect software engineers to know a lot more things than just their application code,” Sandhya Sridharan, global head of engineers’ platform and experience at JPMorgan Chase, said.
The strategy is supported by the company’s internal developer platform which acts as an integrated self-service station, enabling productivity boosts and modern engineering practices, according to Sridharan.
“The goal is to give them the best-in-class, best-of-breed platform so that they can have the best practices and they’re able to accelerate in this highly regulated environment,” Sridharan said.
Curating simplified workflows can help developers focus on their top priorities by reducing context switching and interruptions, according to analysts.
“If you can minimize that cognitive load, then you can also improve flow,” Mark O’Neill, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said during a webinar in July.
JPMorgan credits the internal platform for helping to drive the progress of its public cloud migration as well. The banking powerhouse plans to have the majority of its data and applications in the cloud by the end of this year as part of a broader aim to drive AI adoption and better data management.
As part of the effort to promote internal skill-building and knowledge-sharing, the bank wrapped up its third annual developer conference Thursday with more than 550 tech pros in attendance. The DevUp conference was established in 2022 to support cross-functionality and ideation across the financial institution’s global engineering community.
The conference also serves as a symbol of JPMorgan’s focus on the developer experience, core to the company’s success and a differentiator for the financial institution, according to Sridharan.
The three-day event offered several content tracks for attending developers and engineers, such as tech modernization, applied research and responsible use of AI.
Cautious toward AI, bold on collaboration
Financial institutions are eager to adopt AI, and often credit sustained digital transformation efforts, like cloud migrations, for driving progress with emerging technologies. Even with hurdles that range from poor data quality to infrastructure gaps, more than 2 in 5 banks have integrated generative AI into their tech stacks, according to an NTT Data report published in February.
AI was one of the biggest topics percolating across sessions during the bank’s DevUp conference earlier this week, Sridharan said.
“We are being very thoughtful and very responsible when we roll out AI for our software engineers, whether it's in the coding assistance space or in the discovery of information or easy Q&A or troubleshooting,” Sridharan said.
While AI in software development is widely considered by analysts and researchers as potentially transformative, enterprises are moving forward on adoption projects cautiously.
Researchers have warned about impacts to code quality and rising code churn as engineers add generative AI to their workflows. The security of tools also presents a notable challenge as more than half of organizations say teams have encountered security issues with generated code, according to a Snyk survey.
Like JPMorgan, companies that are piloting tools have underlined the importance of a measured approach. Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan said coders are using AI to improve efficiency, but “there’s still the care that has to be taken on data and usage and models and accountability,” during an earnings call in January.
AI-powered coding tools, which have proliferated in the past two years, are expected to become the norm for software engineers in the next four years, Gartner projects. Sridharan said developers use the conference to share updates on experiments and success metrics, including whether to accelerate the adoption of specific initiatives.
In-person collaboration enables teams that wouldn’t typically interact to work on confronting challenges together. The flow of information is key to solving the complex problems facing the bank, Sridharan said.
“We want to have ingrained in ourselves the culture of engineering excellence,” Sridharan said. “The goal of DevUp has been really to celebrate that engineering excellence … and commitment to building an industry leading engineering community.”
Clarification: This story has been updated to specify the internal developer platform is helping drive the company's cloud migration.
