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Developer Utilization in Outsourcing: How to Calculate and Optimize

· 10 min read
Madiyar Bakbergenov
CEO & Co-Founder at PanDev

McKinsey's research on developer productivity found that software engineers spend only 25-30% of their working hours on active coding. The rest goes to meetings, planning, waiting, and context switching. In outsourcing, where every hour has a direct revenue implication, this split matters enormously. Your company has 40 developers. You bill clients for their time. But how much of each developer's available time is actually billable? If the answer is "I'm not sure," you have a profitability blind spot that could be costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Developer utilization is the single most important financial metric in outsourcing. And most companies measure it wrong — or don't measure it at all.