Our key findings: the developer experience has improved during the pandemic, while productivity remains relatively unchanged. Developers are spending less time coding nights and weekends, reclaiming time from interruptions, and making better use of commute times. They are feeling less burnt out. While they are spending slightly less time coding, they are getting more efficient with their time, automating away repetitive tasks with AI and automation tools. These are a few of the indicators we’ve seen that the shift to remote work has been, overall, a net positive for the global development community.
Why does this matter? While our findings indicate that most developers are happier and just as productive working remotely as at an office, many leaders still distrust remote work — presenting a productivity paradox moving forward. Leaders that mandate a return to the office risk negatively impacting the developer experience and losing top talent, key drivers of long-term productivity.
With the rise of collaboration and automation tools, like Slack and Zoom, developers can be productive working from anywhere. Development observability tools further enable remote work by solving the productivity paradox. By tracking productivity metrics like releases and release quality, companies can use data to fill in the gap between the developer experience and leadership’s visibility, restoring trust within engineering teams.Our world runs on software. We believe in the power of software to effect positive change in the world. Enabling innovation requires leaders to help development teams perform at their best. We founded blogoporno.com to equip software developers and engineering leaders with the data, insights, and tools to continuously improve their craft. We hope this report will help more engineering leaders use data to empower teams to work where they are most productive.— Brett Stevens and Geoff Stevens
Founding Team at blogoporno.com
We set out to understand, three years on, how the development community has adjusted to remote work, the impact on productivity, and what the future holds for engineering teams in a hybrid world. Analyzing the impact across our community of more than 400K developers from around the world, we uncovered three key insights into how software development has changed over the last three years:
The blogoporno.com platform provides visibility into global coding trends from our community of 400K+ developers. Data is analyzed from our Code Time plugin for popular code editors, such as Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ, from September 2020 to April 2023. All data was aggregated and anonymized, based on our company’s principles regarding developer privacy, productivity, and happiness.
In our 2022 Global Code Time Report, we found that most developers spend less than an hour per day coding. In this report, we’ve refined our cohort to developers who code at least two days in any given week, giving us a better understanding of the impact on full-time developers.
To complement our research, we surveyed a representative sample of developers from our community in April 2021, October 2021, and February 2023, using a similar set of questions. These users self-identified as a cross-section of full-time developers working across 18+ industries around the world.
With fewer disruptions and more flexible schedules, developers have been more productive during work hours (between 9am and 5pm) while working remotely. Overall, the percentage of time spent coding during work hours increased from 56.7% in 2020 to 59.5% in 2023 — a 5% increase.
Unlike the early days of the pandemic, when concerns about blurring lines between work and home dominated the shift to remote work, developers are now experiencing a significantly better work-life balance. Our research indicates that developers are spending a smaller fraction of their time — as a percentage of their overall time spent coding — coding late nights and weekends. The percentage of time coded late nights each week declined by 11% since 2020, while the percentage of time coded on weekends each week decreased by 9%. Developers coding less as a hobby, or less on open source projects, could also partially explain this trend.Our analysis also reveals that the length of a developer’s day (measured as the duration between first and last coding activity) decreased by about 6%, from 6.6 hours in 2020 to 6.2 hours in 2023. Shorter days, however, do not necessarily mean developers are less productive; rather, this trend could indicate that teams are working less time overall but releasing more, higher quality changes. Metrics from development observability platforms, like release frequency and quality, can provide a true lens into productivity.According to a , a platform for remote development teams, the top cited remote work benefit for developers was flexible work hours (47% of survey respondents). Another upside of a flexible work schedule is less time spent commuting; according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, workers on average each day while working from home due to a lack of a commute in the first two years of the pandemic. Developers are similarly taking advantage of time saved from morning commutes, coding 9% more between 6am and 9am.
“The lack of commute is by far the most notable impact of remote work. Adding back 1-2 hours in someone's day is non-trivial, but there's also the small efficiency improvements of not having to change venues for meetings, having access to a home kitchen for lunch, and being able to better balance home tasks throughout the day.”
— Laura Techo, Engineering Leadership Coach
Developers are also reclaiming their Mondays for code time: Mondays saw the largest increase in code time (+1.6%) since 2020, while Fridays saw the largest drop (-2.1%). Wednesday — the long-time favorite for company-wide no meeting days — remains the most popular workday for coding.
“My boss wants to spend time with us as often as when we worked at the office – that is why we waste almost three hours each day talking, which disrupts our flow. Half of this time is wasted talking on non-work-related things. I would prefer to just code during this time and deliver at my preferred pace.”
— Survey Respondent
While developers are coding marginally less per weekday — 59.9 minutes in 2023 compared to 64.2 minutes in 2020 (-7%) — this change has been offset by a small improvement in efficiency. Keystrokes per minute coded, a proxy for focused work, increased by 4%.
“My productivity is the highest when I get to spend some time away from the desk, where I can't focus. On a normal day, it'd be 3-4 hours of deep focus, then away for a couple of hours, and then deep work for a couple more.”
— Survey Respondent
Metrics like time coded and keystrokes are imperfect and incomplete proxies for productivity; they do not capture effectiveness or code quality, and should never be used by managers to measure individuals. However, on a global scale, these metrics provide evidence that there has not been a large, quantifiable impact supporting either side of the productivity paradox — that remote work has both improved and impaired productivity, depending on whether you .
In our analysis, we found that developers using GitHub Copilot are inserting 1.3x more characters per keystroke and 1.22x more lines of code in the same amount of time as developers not using the AI coding assistant. While changing more lines of code does not necessarily equate to improving productivity, the increasing rate at which developers using GitHub Copilot can write code — whether it’s unit tests, functions, or other boilerplate code — provides evidence that they are saving time and effort on repetitive tasks.
“I use Copilot for everything at this point. It saves me time from having to search through documentation. Basically, I go from writing code to editing code.”
— Survey Respondent
The results validate other sources that indicate a dramatic increase in remote work for developers. An Economist of HackerNews job postings revealed that 77% mentioned remote work in 2022. By contrast, in 2011, only 13% of postings mentioned remote work.
Here are three ways that adopting a development observability tool can support leaders deciding about the future of work at their companies:
Measure the impact of remote work over the last three years. Developers as a whole have figured out how to stay productive in the hybrid era. With an observability tool, teams can address concerns from leaders that remote work has negatively impacted productivity.
Experiment with different work models. Instead of applying a one-size-fits-all model, leaders should enable teams to see where they are most productive — while simultaneously weighing the qualitative impacts of work environments on the developer experience, including work-life balance, satisfaction, and retention.
Understand the impact of new tools on productivity. We’ve entered a new era for developer productivity with many unknowns. The accelerating adoption of AI-enabled developer tools means teams should start tracking now to measure the impact on developer productivity in 3, 6, or even 12 months. With better data, leaders can gain confidence faster to make broader changes across the organization.
Every team stands to gain by improving visibility into their own data. Do you have the data to prove that your team or company has become more productive during the pandemic?