  Background: Studies on developer productivity and well-being find that the
perceptions of productivity in a software team can be a socio-technical
problem. Intuitively, problems and challenges can be better handled by managing
expectations in software teams. Aim: Our goal is to understand whether the
expectations of software developers vary towards diverse stakeholders in
software teams. Method: We surveyed 181 professional software developers to
understand their expectations from five different stakeholders: (1)
organizations, (2) managers, (3) peers, (4) new hires, and (5) government and
educational institutions. The five stakeholders are determined by conducting
semi-formal interviews of software developers. We ask open-ended survey
questions and analyze the responses using open coding. Results: We observed 18
multi-faceted expectations types. While some expectations are more specific to
a stakeholder, other expectations are cross-cutting. For example, developers
expect work-benefits from their organizations, but expect the adoption of
standard software engineering (SE) practices from their organizations, peers,
and new hires. Conclusion: Out of the 18 categories, three categories are
related to career growth. This observation supports previous research that
happiness cannot be assured by simply offering more money or a promotion. Among
the most number of responses, we find expectations from educational
institutions to offer relevant teaching and from governments to improve job
stability, which indicate the increasingly important roles of these
organizations to help software developers. This observation can be especially
true during the COVID-19 pandemic.
