GitHub's Annual Developer Survey Finds Remote Developers Aren't Returning to the Office

GitHub's annual report on its user community "combined telemetry data from over four million repositories with direct survey from over 12,000 developers to identify current trends among software development companies and open-source projects," reports InfoQ.

ZDNet notes the data shows that remote developers "aren't planning to go back to the office." Before the pandemic, only 41% of developers worked at an office either full-time or part-time, but of the 12,000 surveyed in GitHub's 2021 State of the Octoverse report, just 10.7% expect to go back to the office after the pandemic ends... Pre-pandemic, 28.1% of developers had hybrid arrangements but after the pandemic, 47.8% expect some hybrid arrangements. Before the pandemic, 26.5% worked in places where all workers were remote. Now, 38.8% expect to be fully remote.
ZDNet also highlighted some other general statistics: GitHub says it now has 73 million developer users and that it gained 16 million new users in 2021. Users created 61 million new repositories and there were 170 million pull requests that got merged into projects... One of the biggest projects on GitHub is the container software Docker, which has a whopping 632,000 contributors from 215 countries and consists of 49,593 packages.
That's more than a magnitude larger than the estimated number of Linux contributors — and implies that for every 117 developers now on GitHub, there was one who contributed to Docker.

Meanwhile, 2021's most popular language rankings for GitHub are the same as 2020, with one exception: Shell has risen one position to become the 8th most popular language, edging out C (which now ranks as the 9th most popular language).

And InfoQ summarized some other interesting statistics from GitHub's report:

• Good, reliable, and up-to-date documentation can boost productivity by 50%.

• Documentation is often under-invested.

• The number of pull requests merged within the workday goes down by 17% with each additional reviewer.

WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[mmell]

Maybe it's because of my age (we had transistors, but it was a largely analog world). The social setting is, surprisingly, better and actually contributes to both efficiency and productivity. It was actually possible to talk with somebody, not to them - a subtle but critical difference.

Then again, maybe it's time for me to buy a house on wheels and go nomad. I suppose I could handle an office at the beach, or up in the Rockies, or . . .

Re:

[phantomfive]

Yeah, advantages and disadvantages. I want everyone to be at the office when I want to see them, but I also want to be able to work from Paris any time. Like this guy [inc.com] except he actually can do it because he's an obnoxious executive.

Re:

[echo123]

The office is to be avoided except for the odd meeting as far as I am concerned, and it better be important enough to fly internationally for. Covid isn't going away. There's too much superfluous infrastructure to be accounted for otherwise, and I gave up on all that personally -- fingers crossed. Like real estate, hospitals, transportation, schools. It's not like the corporations have ever been willing to be taxed enough to pay for that stuff.

Re:

[Teckla]

You probably got moderated down because:

1. You presented a lot of opinions as facts.
2. You presented a lot of falsehoods as facts.
3. You supplied no evidence for anything you said.

At best, your post is devoid of value; at worst, it has anti-value.

The down-moderation on your post was fully deserved.

Re:

[angel'o'sphere]

3. You supplied no evidence for anything you said.
This is /. - not wikipedia.

If you find a "claim" (which usually is not a claim, but a statement or opinion) interesting/suspicious (for me that is the same): use google.

Or don't. Up to you.

Re:WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[Anonymous Coward]

> The social setting is, surprisingly, better and actually contributes to both efficiency and productivity. It was actually possible to talk with somebody, not to them - a subtle but critical difference.

I don't know why people keep persisting this myth, offices are significantly less productive precisely because you're getting interrupted by people talking every 5 seconds. I went into the office a few weeks ago for a leadership meeting and we achieved exactly none of the goals for the day because everyone was too busy talking and going off on tangential topics as a result, it was a shocking reminder of how painfully unproductive the office is. The people who miss it are the people who do shit all all day and make up for it by wittering on about mundane nonsense to people disrupting them too - the reason they hate WFH is because they can't mask lack of productivity by walking around chatting and low output from incompetent/lazy staff is easily spotted.

The whole argument about innovation in the office is absolute drivel too, all major tech companies and innovations of the last 40 years were done in peoples bedrooms basements, and homes, whether that's the creation of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and so forth all created in garage/bedrooms, or key pieces of software like Linux, and so on. If you look at these companies that actually got significantly less innovative as they "grew up" and moved to office scenarios - Google was started in a garage, but what novel innovation has Google delivered in the last 20 years? It bought YouTube, it bought Android. Since Zuck created Facebook in his bedroom it's barely changed, the company has only continued to exist from anti-competitive practices of buying up and destroying all competition.

There's just zero evidence that office are productive or foster innovation, the only reason it's a talking point is that it's become an old wive's tale parroted by people who don't like the fact that more flexible working means more focus on productivity and output rather than presence and blagging your way through life.

There's a reason despite severe covid restrictions changing the economy overnight the hit to global productivity wasn't remotely as close to as bad as expected; because productivity lost from industry that had to shut down because physical presence is necessary such as for builders, mechanics, shop assistants and so forth was somewhat counteracted by the increase in productivity from people working at home from outside the office. People not having to burn themselves out travelling for 10 hours a week, and being able to focus on getting their job done, and enjoy their lunchtime walking their dog or whatever leads to a significantly more effective workforce than sending them to a highly distracting, tiresome workplace with long tedious commutes where they're left with no time to look after themselves.

Re:

[saloomy]

Maybe the office was unproductive for you because you were away for so long and starved of the working relationships you typically enjoy. The modern world was developed in office settings. They are magnificently productive; when you haven't been WFH for the last 18 months.

Re:

[Dog-Cow]

You're an absolutist. Always a sign of a moron. Some people are super-productive on their own. Some are productive despite the office setting and some (few) are productive because of the office setting. WFH is a better policy if the balance of employees are the former, and vice versa if they are the latter.

Re:

[saloomy]

You failed to comprehend English. Either the sign of a non-native speaker, or a dumb fuck. Both the person I was responding to and I were commenting on the productive of "the office" and offices in general, not individuals working within them. Rather them as a whole team. Are some people good at working on their own and being super-productive? Sure. But that doesn't mean that offices are unproductive. My point was that the office may seem more unproductive now, as a result of not having interactions with hi

Re: WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[TJHook3r]

The only good argument for working in offices is that chance encounters are significantly improved, of the type when clever people meet to exchange ideas. However, I'm struggling to prove that an office is the place this occurs - school and uni seem to be much better at this!

Re:

[khchung]

There's just zero evidence that office are productive or foster innovation, the only reason it's a talking point is that it's become an old wive's tale parroted by people who don't like the fact that more flexible working means more focus on productivity and output rather than presence and blagging your way through life.

On top of that, the productivity gain from everybody working from home is easily measurable in terms of:

- hours saved from commute

- reduction in sick leave across the board, no more flu spreading through the entire office a few times a year

- reduction in time going from one meeting room to another. Now back-to-back meeting, although still undesirable, no longer wastes 10-15 mins just waiting for people to come in because they were in a previous meeting on a different floor.

- townhalls no longer wastes ever

Re:

[q_e_t]

I went into the office a few weeks ago for a leadership meeting and we achieved exactly none of the goals for the day because everyone was too busy talking and going off on tangential topics

That's a function of meeting management, not location.

Re:WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[Burdell]

There were probably also offices in your time, or at least maybe cubes, rather than the current "open office" fad. Being continuously bombarded with 5 or more other people's conversations, eating noises and smells, and just general personal behavior is a big detriment to productivity.

Re:WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[joe_frisch]

I agree with both the parent and with this post. An *OFFICE* is a very efficient place to work. A desk in an open area is a very inefficient and unpleasant place to work. This may be the big divide between younger and older workers - the work spaces they return to are very different.

If companies provided offices to workers, I think they would have little trouble attracting them back.

Its always struck me as crazy to pay silicon valley wages, then put people in work spaces where their efficiency is dramatically reduced.

Re:WFH is nice, but I actually MISS the office.

[Lije Baley]

Managers had been pushing hard for more of the appearance of productivity anyway - things that are easy to measure and take credit for - so wanted us to stay in your cubes and keep producing. With that and the legal minefield that non-task-related discussion has become, they already didn't want people talking with each other anymore. So now they want people to come back into the office so we can be isolated from each other under their watchful eyes - except they are in meetings all day and so what exactly is the REASON for being there? And why aren't they buckling under climate change scrutiny for making people commute for NO REASON?

It's a survey

[VeryFluffyBunny]

The trouble with surveys is that there's what people say they'll do & then what they actually do. Humans are like that.

Restart.

[Ostracus]

That's terrible, and now no more episodes [nme.com] will be made.

Who wants to go back to the freaking office?

[OneHundredAndTen]

Social butterflies. Backstabbers. Those who can't stand their families/spouse. Managers - so they can justify their superfluous jobs. And very few others.

Re:Who wants to go back to the freaking office?

[Tony Isaac]

I'm a manager, and I love working remotely. My team is functioning extremely well, there is no reason they or I need to go back to the office, in terms of productivity.

The reason you think managers are superfluous is that you've had managers whose contributions were superfluous. There is a such thing as a good manager, I'm sorry you apparently haven't had one. Good managers protect and encourage their teams, they make sure they have the tools and training they need to get things done, they keep the team from being distracted by low-value projects. I personally want a boss like that, and I try to be a boss like that.

Re:

[Dog-Cow]

Good managers seem superfluous, too, because their charges have no idea what their manager is doing for them. I had a supervisor once who was straight up with us: I handle the politics, you produce working code. No one ever thought he was useless or unnecessary.

Re:

[JASegler]

Once you get a system running smoothing it doesn't take much to keep it on course - if you know what your doing.
I can manage a tech team well. What I can't manage is poor management above me. Which is why I am NOT a manager anymore.

I've had a few managers over the years that pulled off managing both sides well. They did a lot of work behind the scenes deflecting BS coming from outside the team. And managing the change in direction that occasionally had to happen. They also figured out how to get the be

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[MarkUltraBlack]

That's not surprising since they can easily work from home, and that way is definitely more comfortable than working in an office. I wanted to become a web developer myself, I learned the differences in flutter vs react native 2021 [www.ava.codes] and other technologies, and it was just because I wanted to work from home. But I discovered that it was too hard for me, so I decided to quit.