Dev during pandemic, how are you doing?

Are devs doing better or worse after a year of pandemic programming?

By Joost Visser and Magiel Bruntink

How are software developers doing, while working at home?

Are you missing the office? The bustle, the perks? Your colleagues? Your boss! Are are you happy to sit quietly at home, where you can pound out code without interruptions? Or are you getting disconnected from your team and its mission?

Developer happiness and developer productivity are known to be interconnected. And both have been impacted by the sudden pandemic-induced switch to fully remote work.

But has this impact been negative only? Or sometimes positive? And what are the factors that developer and their employers can influence to alleviate the bad and accentuate the good effects?

Just after the pandemic hit globally, and governments started to instate lock-downs of varying severity, a team of researchers, led by Dr. Paul Ralph and Dr. Sebastian Baltes, decided to investigate the well-being and productivity of software developers around the globe. What did they find?

• “Developers’ wellbeing and productivity are suffering”
• “Productivity and wellbeing are closely related”
• “Better home office ergonomics help wellbeing and productivity”
• “Women, parents, and people with disabilities may be disproportionately affected”
• “Different people need significantly different kinds of support”

These findings of the pandemic programming study are now a year old. In the meantime, waves and lock-downs have come and gone, and many of us are still working from home. The experience of software developers a couple of weeks into the pandemic versus one year in might have evolved significantly.

To see if anything has changed after a year of pandemic, researchers from the University of Leiden and from the Software Improvement Group, decided to conduct an independent replication of the original pandemic programming study.

If you are a software developer, impacted to some extent by the Covid-19 pandemic, please take the 10-min survey to tell us how your are doing!

• Take the survey here

We are donating $500 to an open source project selected by our respondents. Be sure to vote for your favorite cause to donate to!

The results of the replication study will be available before the summer, and we will publish and link them on this forum and elsewhere.

Read more

• New study: The pandemic effects on developers' well-being & productivity - SIG | Getting software right for a healthier digital world
• Pandemic Programming: Investigating how working from home during COVID-19 is affecting software professionals - SIG | Getting software right for a healthier digital world