JetBrains survey: developers 91% male, 73% experience burnout, more liking Rust and Go

JetBrains survey: developers 91% male, 73% experience burnout, more liking Rust and Go

Tools vendor JetBrains has published its annual survey of development trends, this time based on responses from around 29,000 developers, and it shows the declining use of PHP and Ruby.

Other notable results include increasing interest in Rust and Go, that 73 percent say they have experienced burnout, and that 50 percent of developers use remote collaboration, up from 30 percent a year ago – though the most commonly used tool is video call and screen share, rather than tools integrated with an IDE.

Some 91 percent of respondents identified as male.

The full report has a ton of detail, though the company warns that despite efforts to reduce bias, “some bias is likely present, as JetBrains users might have been more willing on average to complete the survey.” That does seem evident in relatively high figures for JetBrains tools and technologies, though the ubiquitous Visual Studio Code also has a strong presence.

Target platforms in this group are dominated by web back-end and front-end projects, though desktop (32%) is ahead of mobile (28%).

Language trends in JetBrains surveys 2017-2022 – but beware sample bias

Among this community, JavaScript is the top language (65 percent of developers) followed by Python (53 percent ), unless one counts HTML/CSS as a language (54 percent ). PHP has declined from 32 percent to 20 percent since the previous survey, though the drop was partly accounted for by survey bias last time around, when the survey was publicized in Laravel and PHP communities. TypeScript rises from 29 percent to 37 percent . Note that as with most of the questions, totals sum to more than 100% because developers use multiple languages.

Respondents were asked what programming languages they hope to learn, and it turns out there is strong interest in Go (12 percent ), Rust (11 percent ) and Kotlin (8 percent ). There is also the matter of which languages developers most enjoy using, relative to those using the language, and here the top choices are Kotlin (44 percent ), C# (39 percent) and Python (38 percent). Perl on the other hand appears to be disliked by 96 percent, followed by Visual Basic (77 percent), Delphi (60 percent) and C (51 percent).

Remote development is on the rise. 53 percent of developers edit code on remote machines some of the time, according to the survey, with four in five connecting over SSH and 45 percent using a remote desktop. Despite the interest in cloud development environments like GitHub CodeSpaces or Gitpod, only one ion four have used these solutions, compared to 74 percent using their own remote computers or servers.

Remote collaboration is now used by half of all developers responding, whereas face to face collaboration only by 28 percent. The tools in use though are dominated by the simple approach of a video call with screen sharing (49 percent), whereas smart collaboration tools in the IDE are only used by one in five of respondents.

Developers care about their mental health, with around 44 percent claiming to be actively interested in the topic and applying techniques to maintain it. Despite this, 73 v have experienced burnout, with developer advocates the most likely to suffer (83 percent), followed by database administrators (80 percent).