State of the Software Developer Nation

While many media companies predict the burst of the AI bubble, South African developers are still focusing on its potential.

In fact, the percentage of developers who see it as the most promising industry has grown massively, from 50% to 68%. With even more advances in AI tools over the past 12 months, it's easy to see why developers are betting on a bright future for AI: We've seen the release of ChatGPT-4 and open source AI models like Mistral make massive strides, reaching parity with GPT-3.5.

AI is starting to play a role in virtually all industries. There are AI integrations into virtually every app, from Microsoft Copilot, Miro and Photoshop to Notion. One could even ask the question: Given that it permeates every piece of technology and every industry, is it still accurate to consider AI an industry?

Either way, devs are excited about this capacity for innovation. That's why the majority of South African software developers rank it as their most promising industry.

While AI adoption in South Africa was still pretty low last year, now over half of the software developers have worked with an AI API. The majority are also working with code-writing assistants in either their role or personal projects.

This shows that AI has a real impact on how developers do their work, not taking over their work. At the same time, working with machine learning models remains a niche for South African developers: More than two thirds of devs haven't built or trained a machine learning model.

AI isn't just shaking up software development, it's also changing the way developers' technical skills are assessed. The use of online coding challenges by companies for assessing developers has fallen by 21.6% in the past year, since developers can now use AI tools to pass them.

Assessments that assess how someone approaches a technical problem like technical interviews and take home assignments have remained steady. Because these tests are more focused on understanding how someone approaches a technical problem, they are less vulnerable to AI.

At the same time, whiteboard interviews, an assessment developers don't consider particularly useful, are also declining.

While ZA devs have largely avoided a mass return to the office, they are starting to see a change in their remote policies. Over the past 12 months, 17% of developers saw their policy change away from being fully remote.

30% of hybrid developers in 2024 used to be fully remote, while 15% of fully office based developers had a hybrid policy last year. Is this a sign that South African companies are starting to take back control in a tough job market?

As more developers return to the office, they're starting to miss the benefits that fully remote work offered them. Fully remote is now the most desired policy among South African developers ahead of hybrid.

The data also suggests that more developers find themselves at companies who have their preferred remote policy. We can see this in the majority of hybrid devs preferring hybrid and the majority of remote devs preferring remote.

The exception here are fully office-based developers who tend to prefer hybrid setups.

Companies who are fully remote seem to really embrace the benefits of remote work: Almost half of fully remote developers can now work from anywhere in the world, up from 32.6% in 2023. Another 1 in 4 developers have the freedom to be based anywhere in the same country as their company.

At the same time, the number of developers working remotely for international companies has more than doubled over the past 12 months. This suggests that more international companies are seeing the value of hiring South African talent for remote roles.

Developers aren't just theoretically into remote work. The majority say they would leave a role if forced to return to the office full time.

However, this seems to be less of a problem for hybrid devs. With a tougher hiring climate and more developers returning to the office at least some of the time, is this something companies are banking on?

2023 was another tough year for the global tech industry. The funding cool down continued and large tech companies including Shopify, Google and Meta announced layoffs.

South Africa's tech industry has largely avoided the worst effects of these global trends. Yet 5.2% of developers report being retrenched, up from 2.9% the previous year. Why is South Africa more resilient? For starters, VC funding is less common in South Africa than it is in Europe or North America. As a result, South Africa has more bootstrapped businesses that tend to be more robust when funding is less easily available.

Starting with the good news: More than half of retrenched developers managed to find a new role within three months. This shows that there are still good opportunities for skilled developers. On average, senior developers took the shortest time to find a new role.

However, junior developers are experiencing the brunt of the tough job market: Over 40% took more than 6 months to find a new job after retrenchments and their salary growth reflects this too.

After another year in an economic downturn, it's tougher inside most companies. This has led many developers to rethink their current role.

30% say they'll be looking for new opportunities this year. So why are they planning on leaving? Is the grass just greener on the other side?

The data indicates that while salary growth and perks have shrunk, developers leave looking for companies that can still offer better salaries, management and growth opportunities.

As the cost of living continues to rise, it's no surprise that a better salary is still the number one reason why developers leave a role. Nearly half of South African developers list it as their top reason for leaving, down from 52.9% in 2023. At the same time, benefits have also decreased in importance when it comes to leaving a role. They have dropped from 20.5% to 14% in 2024.

But money is not the only factor that matters to developers looking to explore new opportunities. Poor management and a lack of growth opportunities are also still big push factors. Addressing the issue of poor management is especially important to retain tech leads.

Earlier we found that a lack of growth opportunities is one of the main reasons why developers leave a role. The data suggests that more developers don't feel optimistic about their growth prospects at their current company: The share of developers who don't think their company can support their career development has increased from 10% to 12.5%.

At the same time, the share of devs who believe they can continue growing at their current company has dropped to the lowest percentage since 2021.

What's contributing to this decline? We asked developers why they're feeling less optimistic about their prospects for career growth. The number one factor? Lacking trust in company leadership.

The tougher macroeconomic climate is also evident in developer salaries: Across the board, salary band growth for developers has slowed more and more in recent years. Entry-level and junior developers have seen their salaries decrease in 2023, while intermediates have only seen nominal increases.

When controlling for inflation, many developers essentially experienced a decrease in their buying power in the past two years.

In order to give further context on the distribution of our data, we’ve also included the 25th and 75th percentile salaries in this and the following salary graphs.

Let's start with some good news: More than half of South African developers received a salary increase in the past year. Also, despite the challenging climate, fewer companies gave no increases.

That said, annual salary increases have slowed over the 12 months.

We added some new options and removed old ones from our last survey. If you see 0% in a graph, it is due to a change in options between years.

As companies work to extend their runway or hit profitability, many seem to be downgrading their perks, including training budgets. This might explain the falling confidence of developers who don't believe they can continue growing at their current companies.

We're seeing reductions of perks across the board with only a few exceptions, most notably bonuses. This points towards an attempt to still reward developers making a business impact.

On average, the earning gap for female developers has narrowed by 17% percent over the past year and has decreased across all levels of experience.

Average salaries are practically identical for entry-level developers but a pay gap starts to emerge once they've got two years of experience under their belts. The gap is still widest between developers with more than 10 years of experience: Here, women earn 17.4% less than their male counterparts. This is despite female survey respondents being proportionately represented across industries, languages, and location.

We hope that, by providing salary transparency on our job platform and in reports like these, we will equip all developers with the knowledge and confidence they need to earn the salary they deserve. We're also planning to publish further insights on this topic in the future.

Cape Town is still the best place to be for developer salaries: Capetonian developers have earned the highest average salaries in South Africa for four years in a row. However, its dominance might be coming to end as salaries in Gauteng are catching up with those in the Mother City.

Average salaries for entry-level developers are similar across South Africa's three biggest tech hubs, although Cape Town starts to pull ahead after the 2-year mark. The gap between them is widest for developers with four to six years of experience with Capetonian devs earning 15.3% more than Johannesburg-based devs at this level.

This begins to narrow once they reach the senior level and less than 5% separates Cape Town from Johannesburg among developers with more than 10 years of experience.

While niche languages have the highest-average salaries, when it comes to frameworks Java leads the way. Spring and Spring Boot have the highest average salaries among frameworks and lead to higher average salaries for Java developers across the majority of their careers.

For JavaScript developers, the best salaries come from working with frameworks like React or Node.js.