2024 Developer Survey

I must say I have rather soft hearth for the StackOverflow Developer Surveys. Since I learned about it during university I'm on the edge of my sit every year to see what's going on in the industry from the developer perspective. In my opinion knowing development trends and preferences is also a huge advantage for leaders and managers. It allows you to hire better, improve developer experience or just help your teams have more fun at work. This year I'd like to share my few personal takeaways from 2024 edition of Developer Survey.

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The most used IDE

Created in 2016 it needed just 3 years to be used by every second developer. In 2024 74% of respondents used Visual Studio Code and of those that may want to try a different IDE next year are only interested in Vim or Neovim. Second contender, the big brother Visual studio is used by under 30% or contestants. Why such a gap?

Simple. Free. Crossplatform. Extensible. Lightweight. No big, old-fashioned IDE can compare here. Another notable hit is that most big IDEs are created with specific tech in mind. VS mostly targets .NET, InteliJ IDEA goes to Java etc. VSC can change it's usage is just a few clicks with no extra tools - that's a huge deal. Of course you may miss out of some vendor specific features or the IDE may get a bit of patchwork vibe to it after installing 10+ plugins. But maybe that fit your taste? Your call 🤙🏻

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ChatGPT is more common than MS Teams

That one was a shocker for me. The survey reveals that 80% of respondents have use ChatGPT. Tendency is higher for younger devs, but even if we target professionals only that percentage holds up. Sure I was not living under the rock. I've seen it too, used it for various cases, but I would never expect for it score so high on popularity among developers. Second on the AI list is Copilot with over 40%.

For a contrast, if we check standard tools - only ~50% of developers use MS Teams. Or for even sketchier comparison: JS topped the language list (again) with ~62%. ChatGPT prompting is more common than using JS.

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Project documentation in Markdown

One more a bit unexpected result. Third most commonly used asynchronous tool is just a Markdown File! Same spot as last year, but it noted solid growth by 3 points. Interestingly silver medalist - Confluence - lost 3 points compared to 2023.

This is really interesting dynamic. Two first positions are huge IT products, with a lot of ongoing development, features, tweaks and customisation. Third is a file format. That beside bug-fixes has nothing new since 2014. But this is where I find this results counterintuitive.

People use .MD files due to industry wide support and tooling, not for the file format. You can put filed in you Github repo or any other and expect them to be formatted properly. You need a pdf to sent to your customer - Pandoc got you covered. Simple WYSIWYG editor in the app? StackEdit will get you there in hour or two. TLDR; It's not about the file, but about the ecosystem.

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Only 1 in 5 developers are happy about their work

Bucket of cold water for all the leaders and developers out there. Just 20% can say that they are happy about their work environment. 47% are okay at best, and 1 in 3 devs is straight out not satisfied. That is just a terrible result...

2023/24 have not been the easiest period in the IT industry. Layoffs happening right and left, a lot of companies going out of the business or getting into restructuring. This made a lot of people bound to companies that are not a fit for them any more, but cannot make a move due to market getting a bit stale.

Yet this statistic should be a clear highlight for us, managers. How would you feel about you your team knowing that just 20% of your team is actually satisfied? Myself - borderline insecure. I'd be at real risk of loosing best people I have whenever opportunity comes in for them. But it's not like we can just check those numbers yearly and cry how bad it is. Leaders do make an impact. Talk to your people, listen to them, improve DevEx, work on people having real influence on the company doing.