Your developers deserve better: Insights from the 2024 Developer Survey

Every year, we capture a snapshot of the global developer community with our comprehensive developer survey: from the most widely used and sought-after tools and technologies to who developers are, how they learn, and what motivates and frustrates them.

As we absorb the results and take into account the rapid advancements GenAI has brought to the tech industry, certain insights stand out.

Even with the assistance of GenAI-powered coding tools, developers still struggle to find answers to their questions without interrupting their workflows or wasting time with rework. Finding solutions to their own problems and answering colleagues’ questions eats up a significant chunk of developers’ time every day.

Here’s what we found:

• Developers spend a lot of time looking for answers to their questions. More than 60% of respondents spend 30 minutes or more a day searching for solutions, with one in four devs spending at least 60 minutes looking for answers.
• Waiting for answers disrupts developers’ workflows, and devs can’t always find the accurate, timely answers they need to do their jobs well. More than half of respondents (53%) agree or strongly agree that waiting on answers disrupts their workflow, while less than half agree or strongly agree that they can easily surface up-to-date information within their organization to help them do their job. This is in spite of the proliferation and growing sophistication of AI-driven coding tools.
• Developers spend a lot of time answering other people’s questions—often repeatedly. Three out of four developers find themselves answering questions they’ve answered before, while close to half (47%) spend 30 minutes or more a day answering questions. This means that some of your most experienced and knowledgeable employees have less time to spend contributing to new projects.
• Knowledge silos make developers less productive. Knowledge silos are cases where one person or one team has information that hasn’t been shared throughout the organization. For 30% of developers, knowledge silos impact their productivity 10 times a week or even more often—that’s an average of twice a day for a five-day workweek.

To some extent, looking for answers and answering others’ questions are integral parts of any developer’s job. Because their field is constantly evolving, developers tend to be eager to learn and happy to share their knowledge. The challenge for organizations and managers is capturing and preserving knowledge from subject matter experts (SMEs) such that the whole organization can access and benefit from their expertise—without having to interrupt those experts with daily variations on the same questions. Moreover, developers are happier and more productive when they can quickly and easily unblock themselves, surfacing the knowledge they need to do their jobs.

So how can organizations and managers meet these challenges and create a better environment for their engineering teams? Here are our recommendations:

1. Improve/maintain code quality and developer environments. Our survey found that developers draw the most job satisfaction from improving code quality and developer environments, followed by learning and using new tech. And developer experience should be top-of-mind for organizations wanting to attract and retain the best technologists. The survey revealed that fewer than one in five professional developers is happy with their current job (19%), while nearly half 48% were complacent while only 19% were satisfied.
2. Build communities of practice that surface insights from SMEs. Communities of practice (COPs) are self-directed groups organized around a common interest or topic, from a specific programming language to a whole field like generative AI or machine learning. These communities dismantle silos, encourage cross-functional collaboration, enable more autonomous teams, build employees’ confidence and trust in one another, and ultimately accelerate innovation and speed time-to-value.
3. Consolidate knowledge on a centralized platform where devs can self-serve answers to their questions, without interrupting their colleagues or a time-consuming search for answers.
4. Use AI tools to connect people with knowledge. AI-powered chat and search features guide people to the knowledge they need, effectively shortening the distance from question to answer. AI coding tools cut down on the amount of repetitive work required from developers and helps people who are new to a tool or technology upskill

Stack Overflow for Teams gives engineering teams a familiar, centralized, dev-friendly environment where they can work on improving code quality, learning new tools and technologies, and sharing knowledge across the organization.