Ah, the halcyon days of developers as kingmakers, of developers calling all the shots, of developers turning to open source and cloud to route around barriers to productivity (like Legal! Purchasing! Security! Operations!).
Of course, those days never existed. Not perfectly, anyway—and thank goodness. It turns out that in a world increasingly composed of software, developers matter. A lot. They’re not the only thing that matters, but enabling developer productivity has become a key vector in every organization’s success. Which is why, perhaps ironically, the best way to set your developers free may actually be to fetter their freedom.