State of Devs 2026
2026.stateofdevs.com
2026.stateofdevs.com
And the jobs therin are mostly very mundane and of a liniar-translation nature. (translate this Adobe XD design in CSS/React; translate these REST calls to SQL). And 80% of the time was spent chasing trivial mistakes.
Humans can do more for civilization than arranging react components.
That said, there's nothing wrong with making better use of the tiny human capital dedicated to building software and hardware for the rest of humanity.
At that point you would have to accept that almost everything humans are working on day in day out is pretty trivial.
First of all we live in buildings and second of all, we cannot afford to clean most public or shared or business spaces ourselves.
These jobs may be automated too one day, they are certainly partially automated now, but the necessity of the job is obvious.
Notaries and most software dev is completely work-for-work's sake and should not have ever existed.
It is a testament to this fact how streamlined bookkeeping is and always has been on the free market (and even then a large part of private bookkeeping is due to the need to comply with government taxes and regulations; in eg. criminal enterprise, bookkeeping is even more streamlined).
However, software devs have made such a mess of it all, that not even the free market was able to streamline it, creating millions of low-utility software bookkeeper jobs (that are finally starting to go away).
No one is doing anything new or interesting. Another fucking SaaS product and monthly fee is about 90% of the human capital as you put it.
I agree with this part.
Everything else I disagree with. You need to do some more reading about history sir or madame or bot.
But software devs are a much easier target because we can just out-compete them.
Gov/bureaucrats hold monopoly of force, so they get what they want.
This reads like a comment from 2025. LLMs are solving novel math problems and they successfully emulated a PS5, this week lol. You really need to update your priors. It's amazing how many people refuse to do this and make a fool of themselves in public
On the other hand, when I use LLMs, I regularly see them confidently claim information confidently that is false. So, I'd say productivity gains are true but there's also a cost of wrong information being used to make decisions due to AI.
I dont care if you used AI to produce something. If you share it with me, I assume you are responsible for it. You own it, whether you agree or not.
> it's causing people to be confident in information which is false, it's enabling people to treat each other like jerks in even more ways than before
What is the direction of causality here? Does AI make people jerks, or they were already or prone to be jerks?
The same applies to innovations or breakthroughs made by people who use AI in their work.
> LLMs are solving novel math problems and successfully emulated a PS5
Did the AI independently accomplish those things, or did highly competent people accomplish them using AI as a tool?
What would happen if you give someone with no mathematical or programming background the same frontier models that OpenAI used for their mathematical proofs [1]. Would they produce the same discoveries?
I think of humans as constants. They can bring positive, or negative value to the table. The AI is the multiplier.
Take software engineering. If you let someone who doesnt care about code quality (their constant is negative since any code they write will introduce a tech debt) push code to your repo using AI, it will destroy your project. But let an engineer with strong fundamentals and high standards use AI to push code to your repo, they can improve the project much faster than they could without AI.
In a lot of big companies, you had a small majority of people who were incompetent but mostly harmless because their lack of competence prevented them from causing too many issues and another group of people who were competent and productive. Nowadays, with AI those incompetent people can be maximally effective at causing issues due to their incompetence.
The same happens with opensource projects who are now flooded with mostly useless PRs and bug reports from incompetent people directing LLMs to do so. etc...
So yes individually AI makes people productive but I'm not sure if that is true at the scale of a company nor do I think it's necessarily true with opensource projects.
Unfortunately the things we can control regarding other people are limited... So I think least we can do is to either surround ourselves with competent people or if not possible, ignore the AI and hold people accountable based on their final output. I often see people try to defend themselves by just blaming AI when their final output is bad but when its good its their work. But its not an AI problem, its the people problem sadly. I wish the problem was AI btw, it would be much easier to fix.
When talk to people, I regularly see them confidently claim information that is false as well.
This is not the point where LLMs become useless. LLMs become useless when we understand that we are social creatures and that many times the road is more important than the destination. Also, when you provide instant-travel to all the destinations, the destinations lose their value as well.
As any seasoned gamer can confirm. Sometimes there's something lost in that convenience
I wouldn’t say that Dans recent work in maths was necessarily that of an expert. More of a fan of Lean than anything and he did a breakthrough in a relatively short time period.
https://overreacted.io/how-i-vibed-a-proof-of-conways-conjec...
It seems to me it’s about enough money, knowledge, and effort to want to achieve a thing. Which is good, but can and is being weaponized in terrible ways against us.
It's curious seeing "math" and "productivity" in the same sentence when the market assigns much less economic value to math than to other endeavors. The entire annual US federal budget for mathematics a mere ~$100M on average.
Depends on the company, plenty have been run on a culture of fear for decades.
• Denial
• Anger
• Bargaining
• Depression
• Acceptance
Here is what I see(and common thought patterns)
• Denial (models will never be able to replace the majority of important work)
• Anger (angry at data centers, energy use, IP theft)
• Bargaining (people thinking that their personalized agentic dev setup or self-hosting is gonna somehow leave them with meaningful work long-term)
• Depression (people who are being honest about what it will mean to day-to-day lives of many workers in the industry over the next decade)
• Acceptance (people who are focused on the problems that get worse as AI gets better - social disruption, x-risk, government/corporate control)
I haven't touched on bargaining even once, and I don't know if I will ever be able to truly reach acceptance
You can consider all of these problems in the other stages as well, even if you still doubt the impact on your own field. Most devs in the stage of acceptance, however, will be increasingly preoccupied with how to keep paying their bills instead of such lofty questions.
The old refrain that regular people don’t have time for politics. (So let the psychos with money and means arrange everything for you.)
There's a different level of acceptance that embraces this stuff and just leans into it. The grief is still there, but I'm working through the depression and into this stage. Accepting that you've been pushed from a craftsman to a machine operator really sucks. But machine operator is still a job, even after machines get really efficient. Maybe some people can still hang on to their artisanal workshop existence for high value small batch goods. But most of us will just have to make that move to the industrialized model or fall into redundancy.
When I filled this out myself in July, I was "somewhat unlikely"
If you ask me again now, only a few months later, I'm probably leaning towards "Somewhat likely".
Insane how fast this space is moving.
Can you be more specific about what isn't just a growing pain/maturity problem that will eventually be baked into the default products once the unit costs come down?
I can one-shot full video production that takes almost an hour on claude right now and it'll run ffmpeg for a good chunk of that. I don't see how the delegation + infra isn't a solved problem a couple years from now.
By human programming I mean humans typing code.
Obviously the models themselves have trended bigger since which has helped and also just the tooling and harnesses around it and the models being trained for that use case has achieved a lot since that q4 2025 window which is about the first time it became functional for me.
There was so much low hanging fruit back then in terms of training.
Bad Management: 63%
I don't think you can really ask whether people have seen 'bad management' without explaining exactly what that means. People, including me when I was a developer, often see 'bad management' as 'I don't agree with what I'm being told to do'. That's not necessarily bad management; far more often it's poor communication of the facts (although you could argue that's the bad management bit I guess.)
The things I used to think were bad management included hard deadlines, short term benefit projects that took on tech debt, not 'motivating' people by giving better raises, refusing promotions even though I thought someone was great, prioritising things that I didn't see the value in, etc. Those things maybe weren't bad management at all. I just didn't have the full facts.
This is the problem with surveys like this. Someone didn't get the raise they wanted, so they check the 'bad management' box for that tiny cathartic dopamine hit. It doesn't necessarily mean they've been badly managed.
Re: checking the box for dopamine… you might need to check in with yourself about whether you’re a bad manager! I know nothing, but that’s a very bright orange flag lol
Light pink I reckon.
Two things are true at the same time: that as an employee, you will always get a distilled picture of the wider reality from your manager (sometimes to help you focus, sometimes because they're forbidden to share it with you, sometimes because parts of it would damage morale and thus productivity), and that managerial competence is in the communication skills to achieve that focus and morale. Two different managers with different skill levels, each dealing with the same "full facts" reality, will deliver different results.
Related tangent: it's sad to see the decline of high school debate teams, there's probably no better early-life preparation for the management skillset. Competent managers persuade. They know who they're trying to persuade, what that person values, and frame the wider organizational reality in such a way that it will make sense and align their direct report.
The worst managers think their job is to tell you what to do and that your job is to do what they say.
AI makes this a solved problem. It now has superhuman programming ability and will almost always carry the message to Garcia.
- 50% are thinking somewhat-to-very unlikely they'll be changing careers in the next 5 years
- 42% are hopeful or excited about the tech industry
doesn't that ignore the overlap?
1102 of 4694 (23%) respondents said they were hopeful
897 of 4694 (19%) respondents said they were excited
(on that question they could submit more than one answer)
Now? I’m swamped with the dumbest jira tickets in history created by lazy AF project managers and business analysts who are using AI to create a pile of unmanageable slop while looking like superstars as they blithely point to their neatly arranged tickets.
I guess I could try to cope by pointing the AI back at it but for the first time I’m forced to color outside the lines just so I can deliver. None of it lines up with their garbage and so we’re now playing a stupid game of “let’s not and say we did” while I tick of useless tickets that shouldn’t even be in the project.
It is exhausting. Not due to the potentially increased velocity but due to the towering pile of slop getting shovelled over that needs fake responses. I don’t know what to do about that.
Easier said than done though.
You could, but then you shouldn't be surprised when nothing changes. If someone had (repeatedly) filed unworkable tickets/specs pre-AI, what would you have done?
Notice: first working prototype was done after approximately 2 weeks and was done by one developer. Of course it had bugs and was not perfect but it was huge improvement compared to what was before. Imagine that you do not regularly update framework/libraries (as it should be) because of various reasons (client does not want to pay for it or you focus on different things). We understand our decisions and so on, we know it but real life sometimes can not be perfect. Thanks to Codex/Claude we can move forward. Of course we know the LLMs/AI tools are not perfect and magic problem solvers but we could not say that these tools make our lifes worse or something.
there are other parts where its not unless youre playing fast and loose.
Most devs against AI argue that the former tasks were never that big of an issue, but they likely worked at enterprises where those tasks were someone elses job through dedicated teams preparing framework upgrades etc
There is also a gigantic delta between using AI on eg Github copilot through API Pricing and having a Subscription model via Anthropic or OpenAI. Through Github you'll be constantly be worrying about costs, with the Sub youll likely mostly be using SOTA and the quality diffence is staggering, especially since the last model iteration (Opus 5.5)
Think of it this way, before your company would need to hire more people if it wanted to do more. But now the same team can do things like this without hiring more:
> We migrated in 2 weeks to new versions of framework and libraries. If we have to do it without AI, then it will be work for few months or even year...
Maybe long-term this is amortized. But short-term the tendency is lower salaries and layoffs.
Right now AI still isn't autonomous enough to do all of the work itself, so it needs developers to carefully manage it to do what it must.
If things remained like this, then sure, there'd be a point when "AI-management for area X" would become a profession on its own, similar to how similar processes happened multiple times in the past, and that would result in a new balance.
But AI won't remain like that. The end-goal is that a high level executive coils type on, Claude v25 something like:
"Update all my legacy codebase to the most recent everything. Make sure it works perfectly and doesn't break compatibility with anything. Also, while you're at it, these DOCX our customers sent list new features they'd like, so implement it all while you're at it."
And come back in the morning with it all executed perfectly. Which definitely isn't a recipe for human developers to start earning any better.
Human earning ceiling will be how much it'll cost for AI to do it at the same quality and efficiency level. If you charge less than that you'll have work, but not otherwise.
But this is a big problem.
Robots replaced our arms, and we didn't care because we still had our brains. Now they are also increasingly replacing our brains in labour.
Sure, we can all claim to be the ones who actually are able to hold it right, or that we'll shift to doing something slightly a bit different. And that will be true for some subset of people. But the reality is that it's like that old trope of look to your left, look to your right, 2 of you won't be here at the end of the semester.
I know that this is the rhetoric around why people are not having kids, but it's a pretext, it's not the real reason.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
33% say "not finding the right partner". Everything being too expensive such that we're working all the time and don't have any down time is a huge part of that. Economics play into leisure time, stress, and things that kill relationships and the desire to have sex/kids.
The cost of raising a child is enormous. It's dramatically higher than it was 30 years ago, and astronomically more than a century ago. I've known multiple households with dual 6 figure incomes where one quit their job to be a stay at home parent because the cost of childcare was comparable to the reduction in income.
The cost in time is just as bad - no more "go outside and don't come back until dinner", now if you let your kids walk down the street to school/the park your neighbors will call CPS on you, so you have to pay attention all the time.
Rent/mortgages are way up. The cost of food is way up. The cost of education is way up.
Honestly, the primary problem is still the mindset behind most times this line is written.
The cost of raising a child is enormous only if you consider the return a nuisance at best, which many seem to do. If you consider it very rewarding thing you want for your life, working for that a little doesn't seem all that preposterous anymore.
The same peope typically have no problem spending money on frivolous hobbies, toys, travel etc. they technically get no economic return for either.
There may be people who are economically barred from affording children, but most people set the bar at "I want kids with no strings attached".
The real reasons are that we've created a society in which many people no longer consider a rewarding experience they actually want, and those who don't want it no longer have it externally thrust upon them by cultural expectations or pressures as much. I think the latter is good, but the former may be a pervasive failure of character.
You can't pay for day care with vibes.
For example, was it also 33% in the past when the economy was much worse off? Is it still 33% say during crises like a depression or hell even covid? Is it 33% saying "not the right partner" but maybe 50% saying "actually economics"? Is part of the 33% just because the partner isn't rich enough (a very pragmatic and common consideration despite the stigma).
My parents met in the office and started dating after my father made a move. I would NEVER ask someone out at work. In today's culture this is seen as harassment and can get you fired.
Also, I believe that our culture of over-parenting (and therefore many of the associated costs) is a _consequence_ of having fewer children, not the cause. If you put all your reproductive eggs in one basket, you are motivated to overprotect them. That makes a culture of (at least from a historical perspective) insane parenting demands that simply don't scale.
> That if you forced a child on them they could actually suffer through it?
Absolutely, that’s how it always worked before we’ve had good contraception .
2) Inflation of expectation on parenting. Parents used to be much more hands off in the previous generations, but the expectation of what you need to provide has gone thorough the roof and not all is useful, to be honest.
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids.
4) This, I somewhere and will pawn it as my own, but... kids are no longer useful. Previously, kids were a working hand around the house and insurance for parental care when they got older. Both of these are not something necessarily expected of them nowadays.
5) Since women bear the brunt of the rough jobs of child rearing, even in our more egalitarian societies, their increase in options and freedom means a lot opt to just... not do it. As mentioned at pct1. it's really a tough job. Can't say I blame them.
1) Shifting Culture of Norms == Children are expensive. If you have kids you might have to give up the lucrative career opportunities you have been building towards since your university days, and other personal opportunities
2) Inflation of expectations on parenting == Children are expensive. Parents are expected to spend a lot more of their free time and money putting their kids in programs and sports and such
3) Delay in child bearing led to fertility drop when people really want to have kids == Children are expensive. If you want to have them, you need to have them before you are really financially stable and established in a career.
4) kids are no longer useful == Children are expensive. In the past kids were expected to contribute to the household at a fairly young age. Nowadays not so much. This means families either hire someone to do that work or it falls on the parents.
5) Women in the workforce == Children are expensive! Families have an entire extra income with Moms working and they still can't afford childcare. With an entire extra income!
So you're right that the reasons for falling birth rates don't have to be "children are expensive" but all of the reasons are certainly "children are expensive"-shaped
You could do the same kind of exercise with whatever other measurement of reality that you consider to be the pivot of existence like free time or amounts of sandwiches available or whatever (or is that also boiling down to money?).
But that really really hobbles your model of reality so much to the point it's not useful anymore.
And, then by your own standards, were they ever NOT expensive?
Is this expense some relative state to other people, as in if other people have more it means I have less by virtue of comparison or is it some concrete measure of need one can not afford nowadays and they could before.
Yeah a lot of my points are about money. But it's also free time, responsibility, etc
For example my parents used to drop me off for a friends birthday party and then go away. There would be adults there who they trusted to look out for me, and they could use that time for themselves for a bit to do whatever
Nowadays parents literally stay the entire time. That's a pretty large chunk of time that my parents had to themselves and parents nowadays do not. I don't know what other term than "expensive" to describe that, but it doesn't have anything to do with money
Mass Mutual, 2024: Of those surveyed who plan to remain child free, 43% cited “inability to afford children”[0].
Pew, 2024: Of those who feel it is unlikely that they will have children, 41% of people under 40 cited “can’t afford it” as a reason they are not having children, versus only 22% for those 40+[1].
Morning Consult, 2020: 41% of adults without children cite “it’s too expensive to raise children” as a reason; 24% say it is a “major reason”.[2]
BadCredit.org, 2024: 86% of adults who have delayed having children did so for financial reasons[3].
The Morning Consult survey may be particularly useful if you want to look at just one, because it has more granular age cohort breakdowns which show a clear trend for younger people not having children for financial reasons.
[0] https://www.massmutual.com/global/media/shared/doc/q3_2024_m...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/reasons...
[2] https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/09/2806512...
[3] https://www.badcredit.org/studies/plans-to-have-children-in-...
Let's look at Hungary: loans unless you have 3 (!) children, maybe some housing subsidies that require you to match them with a huge chunk of your own money. Small wonder why that didn't motivate many people.
What countries do want is to incentivize production of properly raised, well mannered, productive children. And the type of person incentivized by a lot of cash to have a kid is probably not going to be the one to do that.
I think the bigger change is: I don’t want my quality of life to go down one bit when I have a kid!
I still think the both parents working thing was maybe good for gender equality but you gotta say the capitalists loved it and probably creamed themselves imagining double the labor pool. But now you see the price of it. How can it be possible for both parents to work and still somehow have kids?
No more super cheap teachers and kindergarten i guess.
Yes, there's lots of things about today that are better than 30 years ago. TVs are bigger, cars are safer, etc. But the ability to give you kids the childhood and initial opportunities you had seems far less likely to many people.
If you don’t want to have kids for any other reason, that’s valid. It’s a ton of work and requires insane resilience. But money is certainly not it, not for SWE.
Fascinating. I wonder if there is some other confounding factor here.
- 49, leaf on a tree.
> while Japan shows the highest immigration levels among respondents, this is almost certainly due to the survey failing to reach the native Japanese population more than to any real demographic trend.
So we are admitting that the result is useless?
> despite being known as “a nation of immigrants”, only 17% of respondents from the U.S. have immigrant roots, versus 22% overall.
What was he expecting? 100%? From what I can find, US first born immigrant % is about 16%, so basically within the massive margins of error this thing has, this is a non result.
I don't think this thing is designed to elicit anything useful except vibes & giving the author a platform to pontificate.
The fact that the survey may not be representative on things like immigration or its Japanese audience has no relation to the data's validity on completely unrelated questions such as developer's outlook on AI.
I have also had just as many terrible managers. At the last job I worked with somebody who thought they were my manager. They weren't and did not even have the same employer. They were my peer. Nonetheless they withheld client communications until my own employer was forced to fire me. Their employer fired them shortly after. Could it have been the fraud, the dereliction of duty, the toxic leadership? Who knows, there are just so many to choose from.
How did we get here? Well, in the corporate non-software company world there is clearly an 80/20 rule at play. 80% of the developers provide 20% of the total development value. Most of my career has been in non-software company web businesses like Travelocity and Expedia. I have also spent time in finance, where that company employed more developers that most large companies have total headcount. Most of these people were some form of JavaScript framework in the browser and Java outside the browser doing the backend web things.
Most of these people really sucked at what they do. They weren't terrible people, some few were, they just weren't properly mentored and worked in an environment where failure and coloring books was more of the expectation than the exception. To be more clear, in case the analogy was ambiguous, most developers are intentional over paid commodities to be hired and fired as rapidly as they could be found.
After a couple decades of this madness this is the baseline culture of user-face web software. Essentially: drop out of high school, go to a 6 week boot camp, put text on screen with React for $140k per year. Or, plan B, pay way too much for a computer science bachelor's degree and start at 20% higher compensation. Not surprisingly there is a lot of insecurity there (I saw it screaming from the shadows at every job). Say anything about it and the resentment comes alive in all its wonderful forms. Less surprisingly, over time those people get promoted into management where neglecting skill development becomes the standard for the next wave of new hires, as if to say: "STFU, go back to your coloring books". It really comes full circle when people then use their inability to innovate as a badge of honor to justify their continued employment.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026
I mean.. if it was the first time asking... why do you draw the conclusion that these are changes?
Insufficient wages, really? I understand you might be underpaid compared to your peers, but do developer really suffer from "insufficient wages"?
edit: I assumed this was US centric. It isn't. I could see insufficient wages outside the US.
So insufficient wages? Yep. It pays more than working at a bar, but not by that much. Anyone graduating CS that can at least go to the bigger cities, or better yet, has the language skills to move further away, just does.
archive: https://archive.is/Ggfma
the españa vaciada continues due to wage stagnation :(
i hope salaries improve, but i'm not optimistic for new grads short term. i'm hoping big companies will learn their lesson that not hiring newer engineers is a mistake. no one will be around to supervise the ai agents if a talent pipeline is not built. there's too much short term thinking in today's gold rush
I can't understate how many jobs get outsourced like that. I got very lucky to get a job here, but my employer doesn't have any junior/mid software positions in my country anymore. Not even internally. And it's a swiss software company.