I’ve been using corne (40% ortho split) for software development for over a year now. It is most definitely the way to go. Having common symbols ()<>{} be on a layer on the home row is so fantastic for typing speed.
3 months on Corne and Colemak. Dont attempt if you just started a new job, dont ask me how I know.
The only benefit for me is I started to appreciate keyboard macros (built in/QMK, or AHK), IDE custom snippets, and gaming mouse macros (navigation mainly eg: goto implementation/definition, booarks, etc).
It made me a slightly better dev because I now take advantage of these features
That makes sense. I recently got a keyboard with configurable layers, but I'm using mostly standard qwerty to start out, adding custom bindings one at a time. I think I'll try out your suggestion, would you mind sharing more details of your configuration?