Brian Houck
MICROSOFT - Sr. Principal Applied Scientist
Brian Houck is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft who focuses on understanding, and improving, the developer experience within engineering organizations. His work combines large-scale telemetry analysis, field experiments, surveys, and qualitative research to uncover the technical, cultural, environmental, and organizational factors that shape developer productivity and wellbeing.
Brian co-authored the SPACE framework, now one of the most widely adopted approaches for measuring developer productivity worldwide, and his published research continues to guide engineering and policy decisions at Microsoft and across the industry. At Microsoft, Brian leads the research for EngThrive, the companys central developer experience initiative. His philosophy is simple: Improving productivity requires addressing both the technical constraints that limit innovation and the human factors that shape how people experience their jobs.
Presentations
Technical Debt Is The Hidden Tax on Innovation
Technical debt is often treated as a code-level problem, addressed in the cracks of time between features. In practice, it behaves more like a hidden tax on innovation, quietly reducing the amount of time and energy teams can devote to new ideas.
In this session, we examine data on the prevalence of technical debt across modern engineering organizations, showing that debt is not an exception but the norm. We connect this debt to everyday forms of developer toil that result from existing debt and actively contribute to its continued accumulation.
Drawing on quantitative signals we show how unpaid technical debt progressively erodes innovation time, even when teams appear busy and delivery metrics remain stable. Rather than focusing on strategies for paying down debt after the fact, this talk reframes technical debt as a systemic outcome of incentives, planning assumptions, and work design.