World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage • Jul 2, 2026 • Session details

Software Development is (not) getting easier

Better tools haven't made software development easier. They’ve merely displaced complexity into your macro-architecture, fueling explosive scopes and driving impossible expectations for today's engineering teams.

Pause

Mute

Enter Fullscreen

#1 about 6 min

Measuring software team growth through video games

How comparing credits from early and modern games reveals the massive exponential increase in team sizes.

#2 about 2 min

The rebound effect in software engineering teams

Why making development faster and cheaper paradoxically leads to larger teams and more complex projects.

#3 about 4 min

How market competition drives application feature bloat

How businesses avoid market cannibalization and free alternative products by continuously cramming more features into single broad applications.

#4 about 5 min

Pioneer phases versus mature gatekept technology markets

The cyclical transition from open experimental hobbyist spaces to strict corporate standards requiring formalized education.

#5 about 4 min

The impact of inflated productivity expectations over time

How continuous incremental improvements eventually establish unsustainable baseline expectations for an individual developer's daily output.

#6 about 3 min

Creative optimization around strict hardware system limits

How historical constraints forced innovative problem-solving mentalities that modern endless computing power often bypasses entirely.

#7 about 3 min

How new technological solutions generate entirely new problems

Why seemingly perfect answers like asynchronous parallel code or decentralized blockchain often lead to distinct new architectural blind spots.

#8 about 8 min

Moving architectural complexity instead of genuinely reducing it

How organizational patterns like microservices merely shift mental loads and necessitate highly specialized internal team hierarchies.

#9 about 5 min

Outsourcing developer mental load to external software frameworks

The trade-offs of heavily relying on third-party abstractions including unavoidable vendor lock-in and navigating deep technology layers.

#10 about 3 min

The real-world constraints capping continuous software complexity

How practical project constraints of budget margins, release cycles, and user comprehension naturally restrict the infinite scaling of technical difficulty.

Matching moments

3:40 min

Identifying core challenges in modern software development

Markus Eisele

Markus Eisele · World Congress 2024

1:44 min

Understanding the complex landscape of software development

Luís Ventura

Luís Ventura · World Congress 2024

4:10 min

Preventing developer burnout by avoiding toxic productivity trends

Katja Träumner

3:31 min

Translating internal software complexity to external perspectives

Hendrik Lösch

Hendrik Lösch · World Congress 2025

2:18 min

Designing poor software architectures by ignoring Conway's law

Marlene Roth

Marlene Roth +1 · World Congress 2025

2:45 min

Balancing developer productivity with modern demands

Markus Eisele

Markus Eisele · World Congress 2025

More from World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage

One Does Not Simply Make Architecture Decisions Alone thumbnail

One Does Not Simply Make Architecture Decisions Alone

Vladas Diržys

From Black Box to Glass Box : Bedrock AgentCore Observability thumbnail

From Black Box to Glass Box : Bedrock AgentCore Observability

Yasemin Aktürk

Leading in Rhythm: How Women Make Better Decisions with Biological Intelligence thumbnail

Leading in Rhythm: How Women Make Better Decisions with Biological Intelligence

Julia Grosse

Better Together: Leveraging Your Observability Tools as a SIEM thumbnail

Better Together: Leveraging Your Observability Tools as a SIEM

Mathias Palmersheim

ChatGPT Apps: From Chat to Checkout thumbnail

ChatGPT Apps: From Chat to Checkout

Aaron Koivunen

Interior Decorating (TypeScript Decorators) thumbnail

Interior Decorating (TypeScript Decorators)

Michael Dowden

Upcoming sessions on this topic

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 15:30–16:00

Stage 3

The New Bottleneck in Software Development

Aditya Jayaprakash

Co-Founder & CEO at Blacksmith

Aditya Jayaprakash

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 16:10–16:40

Outdoor Stage

When Humans Stop Writing Code: Rethinking Languages, Compilers, and Responsibility

Simon Auer

Organizer of flutter vienna meetup and CEO of marqably

Simon Auer

World Congress 2026 North America

September 24, 2026 · 16:10–16:40

Stage 2

The Death of the Code Review

Laurie Voss

Head of Developer Relations

Laurie Voss

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 14:10–14:40

Stage 1

The Broken Rung: How AI is Rebuilding Software Development from the Ground Up

Tomislav Tipurić

Chief Technology Officer, Nephos

Tomislav Tipurić

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 14:50–15:20

Tech Leaders Stage

Keeping Code Quality at AI Speed

Daksh Gupta, Arthur Hicken, Jack Danger

Daksh Gupta

Arthur Hicken

Jack Danger

World Congress 2026 North America

September 25, 2026 · 16:30–16:40

Outdoor Stage

12 Names for the Same Thing: Why Developer Experience Can't Grow Without a Common Language

Artem Mukhin

Software Engineer at Microsoft

Artem Mukhin

Related videos

Thoughts on (Modern?) Software Development - Observations From a 21-Year Journey thumbnail

Europe 2026 Virtual • 2 months ago

Thoughts on (Modern?) Software Development - Observations From a 21-Year Journey

Alex Thurow

Get old, go slow, write code! thumbnail

LIVE • over 4 years ago

Get old, go slow, write code!

Tobias Modig

Move fast with Software Architecture thumbnail

World Congress 2021 • about 5 years ago

Move fast with Software Architecture

Simon Lasselsberger

From Punch Cards to AI-assisted Development thumbnail

World Congress 2023 • about 3 years ago

From Punch Cards to AI-assisted Development

Francesco Ciulla

Antipatterns - nemesis of software development thumbnail

World Congress 2021 • about 5 years ago

Antipatterns - nemesis of software development

Mustafa Toroman

Why (most) software projects fail silently... thumbnail

World Congress 2025 • about 1 year ago

Why (most) software projects fail silently...

Hendrik Lösch

Related articles

AB

Andre Braun, GitLab

Now is the time for industrialized software development

Now is the time for industrialized software development Recently, I received a letter from my car’s manufacturer alerting me to a recall. They had discovered a defective part and wanted to replace ...

about 1 year ago

A person developint HTML on a laptop with the sun shining on it.

DC

Daniel Cranney

How to Avoid Over-Engineering

In today’s software development world, the demand for designing applications that are both robust and easy to maintain is more pressing than ever. Many developers encounter the architectural chaos ...

over 1 year ago

A series of code blocks with 'X's on showing they are incorrect, with one CSS block shown as the correct answer.

JF

Jonas Fritzsch

Résumé-Driven Development: How IT trends affect the job market for software developers

AbstractTechnology trends play an important role in the hiring process for software developers. Recently, various sources point out misunderstandings and bad practices in this area. The anecdotal t...

almost 5 years ago

Résumé-Driven Development: How IT trends affect the job market for software developers

BR

Benjamin Ruschin

What Developers Can Learn from Indie Games

The beauty of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress is seeing developers from every corner of the industry come together and share their passion for programming. Back in summer 2025, at our Berlin Wor...

10 months ago

Split screen before game development and other kinds of software engineering

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Software Engineer, Client Apps Platform

Expert $329k Remote Ruby Golang Github

about 2 months ago

Forward Deployed Software Engineering - Senior Manager

San Francisco, CA, United States

Expert $124k–335k Code Review Api Management Software Systems

Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise Products

Expert $124k–329k Remote Ruby Bicep Golang

about 2 months ago

Forward Deployed Software Engineering - Manager

San Francisco, CA, United States

Experienced $99k–266k Microservices Api Management Software Systems

14 days ago • Verified

Manager, Engineering, Secure Build and SCS Services

Expert Remote Team Leadership

about 2 months ago

Staff Software Engineer, Database Infrastructure

Experienced Remote Ruby MySQL Golang