A survey of 200 senior developers at medium-large sized brands by enterprise CMS Storyblok has revealed the factors that developers say make them most productive at work.

Storyblok surveyed developers on their job satisfaction, personal working preferences, and how their job impacts their personal life.

AI is dominating how developers code – 89.5% of respondents said they use AI to code frequently or constantly. Ranking the reasons why, the top was ‘increasing efficiency’ at 30%, followed by automating routine tasks (23%), and improving skillset at 22%.

Interestingly, when asked if AI would enable them to do their marketing counterparts’ jobs in the future, 28.5% of developers said they could do all of a marketing job, 45.5% said most of it, and 20% some.

Only 5% said they couldn’t do any of it. Marketers were slightly less bullish, with 18.5% saying they could do all of a developer’s job, 32% most of it, 37.5% some of it, and 8.5% none.

On needing help with a work problem, AI was preferred to people. 34% of developers said they now turn to AI for the answer, with only 20% saying they would ask a colleague.

Work-life Balance

Sixty-six percent of developers said they have a great work life balance, with only 2% saying it was ‘bad’. 13% said they are ‘always stressed’ by their work, 16% are stressed ‘most of the time’, 58% ‘some of the time’, and 13% are ‘never stressed’.

When asked what made them most unhappy in their day-to-day jobs, the chief culprit was ‘maintaining and fixing bugs on legacy system’ (27.5%), followed by ‘dealing with non-technical stakeholders who don’t understand technical limitations’ (21.5%), and ‘a lack of clear requirements and constantly shifting priorities’ (14%).

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Digging into the numbers, the situation becomes more complicated at home. One in four developers said they argued ‘all the time’ with their partner or spouse about their job, with 17% saying it was ‘often’ and 22% ‘sometimes’. 13% said they didn’t argue at all.

When asked how often they checked work emails during time off, 13.5% of developers said every hour, 57% said ‘multiple times a day’, 18% once a day, and only 4% said never.

Despite this, 94% of developers said they have no regrets about their chosen career, and 92% would be very happy if their real or imagined children followed the same path.

“Developers are among the most exposed to the impact of technological developments, so gaining a deeper understanding of their personal workplace preferences, stresses, and productivity more broadly can help businesses determine how best to manage change, improve happiness, and productivity,” Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok, said.

“For example, we see a clear problem with many developers being unable to switch off on holidays. Simple policy and expectation changes could alleviate this problem and may have the knock-on effect of lowering stress levels.”