Many things affect the speed and quality of engineering work. Top talent, effective tools, and clear direction are all crucial, and good engineering leaders focus on these. Cognitive load and process friction, however, often get less attention, but they are just as important. And when they grow unchecked, even the best engineers lose focus, velocity, and motivation.
This post will look into the effects of high cognitive load and process friction on software engineers and how you can reduce these burdens, improve developer experience (DevEx), and increase sustainable performance.
»Why worry about cognitive load?
The term cognitive load originates in the field of psychology (John Sweller, Cognitive Load Theory) and is used to describe the mental effort required to process information in working (short-term) memory. Because our working memory is limited, presenting too much new information or requiring many simultaneous mental steps can overwhelm it.
In software engineering, cognitive load refers to the mental effort engineers must expend to complete a task. Time spent understanding, changing, or reasoning about a codebase, a feature, architecture, dependencies, infrastructure, and security all contribute to cognitive load.
When developers have to hold too many details in their heads, their working memory becomes overloaded. As a result, mistakes increase, creativity drops, and progress slows. Research has shown that developers experiencing high cognitive load make more errors and work less efficiently than developers who are able to minimize cognitive load.
»Examples of process friction
While cognitive load is about mental effort, process friction is about the barriers, delays, and inefficiencies in a developer’s workflow. It’s the resistance engineers experience in getting their work done, not because of domain difficulty, but due to tooling, handoffs, bureaucracy, tooling gaps, or suboptimal workflows.
Process friction takes many forms, including:
- Waiting on other teams (ops, security, infrastructure) to review or provide dependencies
- Manual or error-prone deployment processes
- Poor tool integration
- Lacking or inconsistent automation
- Slow builds, long feedback cycles
- Hard-to-reproduce or flaky environments and dependencies
- Approval or gated processes (manual reviews, compliance signoffs)
- Frequent interruptions, context switches, meeting overload
- Unclear responsibilities, ambiguous handoffs between teams
- Poor documentation, inconsistent standards
It’s important to note that while friction slows developer productivity, not all friction is bad. Some friction is required for legal and/or business reasons. Excessive or unnecessary friction, however, is a key source of frustration that can lead to job dissatisfaction and talent attrition.
»The high cost of neglect
If cognitive load and process friction are not continuously re-evaluated by engineering leaders, problems soon follow. These typically manifest in several ways:
»Slower delivery
Software engineers thrive when they are able to enter a flow state — a period of uninterrupted time when they can concentrate and focus on deep work. Friction or cognitive fragmentation (e.g. context switches) breaks that flow and forces developers to re-orient, which is costly in terms of wasted time and delivery delays. Frequent task switching alone is a major drain on developer productivity.
»Lower quality code
When mental bandwidth is stretched thin, errors multiply. Teams working under constant overload tend to ship fragile designs, patch instead of refactor, and accumulate technical debt that further raises cognitive cost.
»Higher burnout rates
Keeping top talent is critical for every organization, and software engineers are no different than other high-value roles. For software engineers, sustained cognitive strain and workflow frustration are leading causes of burnout. Engineers who spend more time battling processes than solving problems eventually disengage. Push them too hard without streamlining the process hurdles, and they will eventually break.
»Onboarding headaches
New engineers joining a complex, friction-filled system face steep learning curves and long ramp-up times. This can cause many downstream issues:
- Developer frustration
- Reduced morale
- Delayed impact of new team members
- Higher dependency on existing team members (which disrupts their flow and slows their productivity)
- Poor experience for new hires overall
If the new hire experience is bad enough, it could also lead to even higher rates of attrition.
»3 ways to reduce cognitive load and friction
There are many ways to improve the working environment for software engineers, ranging from tooling and process reengineering to rewards and recognition. Here are three specific things you can do to improve developer experience:
»1. Create an internal development platform
If developers can spin up infrastructure, staging environments, or deploy features without waiting on ops teams to manually review and approve every deployment, friction drops dramatically.
Internal development platforms (IDPs) give developers self-service access to environments, scaffolding, and standardized workflows, because automated guardrails can be built in. IDPs offer developers “golden workflows” which include pre-assembled, pre-secured, and pre-approved components such as:
- CI/CD pipelines
- Secured-by-default infrastructure module templates
- Automated policy checks
- Golden machine images
…and other abstractions that reduce the toil and expertise needed to deploy applications.
»2. Prioritize time for deep work
Let your team know that you understand what it takes to deliver high-quality software. Help them:
- Guard large blocks of uninterrupted focus time
- Eliminate unnecessary meetings and administrative tasks
- Minimize context switching as much as possible
One way to reduce context switching is to help narrow engineers’ focus so they don’t have to juggle multiple domains or divergent tasks at once. It’s also best practice to keep their task and project scopes manageable. Encourage async communication, and measure actual flow efficiency, not just throughput.
»3. Measure developer experience
Create a program for developer experience. You can use the SPACE framework and DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) as guidelines. The SPACE framework emphasizes holistic developer productivity, while DORA metrics (lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, change failure rate) link directly to business outcomes. Combining them helps you balance delivery needs with subjective well-being, letting your team know you care about more than just deliverables.
»Proven DevEx best practices
As an engineering leader, reducing cognitive load and friction is one of the best investments you can make for your team’s developer experience. In fact, many boardrooms are already waking up to the importance of developer experience.
For proven best practices to build your DevEx program, read 13 DevEx best practices: Your cheat sheet for improving developer velocity and retention.
