A survey found 83% of developers are working remotely more than half of the time, with more than three-quarters (76%) reporting they have maintained or increased the frequency of remote work in the last year. In fact, three in five respondents (62%) work remotely at least 90% of the time.
The survey, published by Netlify, a provider of a platform for building the front end of Web applications using the Jamstack framework, polled 6,544 developers in the Jamstack community and found more than half (55%) would quit their jobs if forced to return to an office.
It’s not clear how much remote work has become a de facto requirement for organizations to attract and retain developer talent, but it’s clear that, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dynamic between developers and the organizations that employ them has completely changed.
Netlify CEO Mathias Biilmann said regardless of industry, it’s apparent that DevOps teams are going to continue to need to make adjustments to foster collaboration across distributed teams. Senior managers will find it increasingly challenging to manage workflows across a workforce that is also witnessing a lot of turnover, he noted. A third of survey respondents (33%) reported having changed jobs in the last year. It’s not clear how much a lack of interaction in the office might be impacting innovation, but at a time when demand for developer talent far exceeds the available supply, organizations will need to adjust to what appears to have become a permanent new reality.
At the same time, the Netlify survey noted the pace at which emerging technologies are being embraced continues to rapidly evolve—perhaps because of rather than in spite of remote work. For example, the survey found 70% of developers reported using a serverless computing framework in the last year. Nearly half (47%) are also experimenting with edge dynamic sites, the survey found. It’s clear that company culture, at least in terms of technology adoption, plays a large role in attracting developer talent.
Overall, 96% of survey respondents noted that JavaScript is their primary choice of programming language, with 21% of developers now specifically using TypeScript to build applications. The React framework for building applications, meanwhile, is being used by 71% of developers, with 47% reporting they employed the Next.js version of that framework. Other React frameworks gaining traction include Vite (32%), Sveltekit (15%), Astro (11%), Remix (10%) and SolidJS (6%).
However, emerging Web3 technologies have yet to gain traction. While 7% to 10% of developers have tried out technologies such as cryptocurrencies and NFTs, only 3% reported using these technologies regularly. A total of 42% of developers either didn’t know what Web3 was or didn’t care about it, while 31% felt negatively about it, the survey found.
Ultimately, the primary reason organizations invest in DevOps is to increase developer productivity. The challenge is that, as developers embrace more tools and platforms for building applications, the process of deploying those applications becomes more challenging to manage effectively. One way to achieve that goal is to separate frontend and backend software development processes to enable developers to focus more on writing code rather than managing the arcane processes required to deploy it.
