Developers’ Lifestyles
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The following section covers various aspects of developers’ lives, including сareer, education, mental well-being, and hobbies.
Career
The prime age for switching to IT is in one’s thirties, accounting for 38% of the career changes. 46% of those who have been in IT from the very start of their careers are people aged 21–29.
Interestingly, among those who switch to IT rather than get into it from the start, a lot more people are enticed by the possibility to work remotely (14% vs 6%).
The top three job aspects have not changed from last year: good hours, good pay, and feeling you can achieve something are still the most important things for our respondents.
Interestingly, women lead men in valuing generous holidays and an opportunity to make the world better (by six percentage points), but say good pay is important less often (by four percentage points).
Education
Respondents aged 30–39 began their developer training at universities (34%) or massive open online courses (MOOCs) (18% for free courses, 11% for paid courses). The situation is very similar for respondents in their twenties: 34% for universities, 23% for free MOOCs, and 11% for paid MOOCs. The top three programming languages preferred by such respondents were Python, JavaScript, and Java.
TechRepublic
The survey results show that respondents are serious about learning in both intentional and casual ways throughout their workdays. Respondents showed a high interest in learning new languages, with Python, JavaScript, and Java leading the list of languages they have started or continue to learn. Over 50% of those who are learning new languages do so out of interest, while 44% and 43% of learners are motivated by personal projects and keeping up with the latest trends, respectively. Python’s popularity is confirmed by the TIOBE Index, and the ongoing explosions in AI, automation, data analysis, and data visualization needs across many organizations make it a useful language for any developer.
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75%
of respondents have quit a course or program before coming back to finish it.
TechRepublic
The survey responses also show that a majority of developers (67%) like to learn through documentation and APIs. No surprise there, since 75% of respondents said they have quit learning courses or programs before finishing them, with 46% citing not enough time and 39% saying the course wasn’t interesting enough. These stats may indicate that programmers like to get a handle on the basics through traditional means before researching use cases similar to their project goals.
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Written content is still the most often used to study computer science, even among zoomers. Respondents aged 21–29 who are switching their primary field to IT tend to prefer video learning content (52%) more than text (44%). However, there is no significant difference for respondents in their thirties. Respondents whose primary field was IT tend to prefer text, with the difference slightly more pronounced for ages 30–39 (56% for text vs. 44% for videos) than for ages 21–29 (52% vs. 47%). Among zoomers, the overall ratio of video/text is close to 50/50.
Mental well-being
Sadly, almost three-quarters of our respondents have experienced burnout at some point in their careers. The good news is that close to half attend to their mental health, mostly by practicing psychological techniques on their own. This year, we decided to examine the interplay between burnout, mental well-being, and lifestyles.
Respondents who have experienced burnout are seven percentage points more actively interested in their mental health.
47%
of those familiar with burnout use self-monitoring apps or devices to track their physical activity, sleep quality, and other health parameters, compared with 41% of those who have never experienced the affliction.
Those who have experienced burnout feel tired more often.
Apart from pay raises, appreciation from colleagues, seeing that one’s work makes a difference, and enjoying the work itself are our respondents’ top three reasons to feel productive. This indicates, to us, that software development is more about working with people than with technologies.
More than half of developers (56%) say that learning how to use their IDE increases their daily coding productivity.
Interestingly, developers who have experienced burnout more frequently say that their daily coding productivity is boosted by factors connected with mental health, self-organization, and time management (46% vs. 42% of those who haven’t experienced burnout), as well as managing emotional state (25% vs. 15%), but less frequently report that their coding productivity is boosted by tooling.
Meanwhile, those who haven’t encountered burnout point more often to factors like learning the IDE (59% vs. 55% of those who are familiar with burnout), organization of work and processes (31% vs. 28%), and upgrading their IDE’s functionality (37% vs. 32%).
Digital Life
TechRepublic
When consuming IT-focused articles online, 62% of respondents consider tutorials to be useful to their work, followed by news (55%) and trends (54%). Developers tend to access IT news on social media (50%), IT-focused websites (48%), and YouTube (45%), where experts and practitioners tend to provide much of the content. Of the social sites, respondents reported that they actively use accounts on GitHub (76%), X (formerly Twitter), (48%), LinkedIn (48%), and Stack Overflow (47%). With the possible exception of X, these platforms are directly tied to professional improvement and learning. Developers are seeking professional content that makes them better at their jobs, ready to find the next one, and prepared for the next new thing.
TechRepublic empowers professionals to lead their organizations through technology with news stories, insights, features, tutorials, and product recommendations they can trust.
73%
of respondents play video games, with age being a definite factor: 85% of under 21s partake of the hobby, but this number drops to 33% for those over 60.
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