Developers spend only 16% of their working time on coding, the rest is spent on background and operational tasks

The latest analyst report IDC (via InfoWorld) shows that the vast majority of developers’ efforts in 2024 were spent on background and operational tasks, while coding took only 16% of the total working time.

However, the time spent on coding at work increased by 1% in 2024 compared to a year ago, and the biggest change in the survey results was that developers spent significantly more time on security last year — 13% vs. 8% in 2023.

Below is a full breakdown of the results of developers’ answers to the question «What percentage of your time in a typical month is spent on the following tasks»?

• Application development — 16%
• Writing requirements, tests, and applications — 14%
• Security — 13%
• Implementation of CI/CD processes and methodologies — 12%
• Monitoring and management of application performance — 12%
• Code deployment — 12%
• Monitoring and management of infrastructure performance — 11%
• User experience — 10%

At the same time, the report notes that generative artificial intelligence tools and AI agents to increase developer productivity speed up coding efforts and somewhat reduce the time spent on documentation, testing, and product deployment.

In fact, this study confirms many previous statements: Amazon has said that developers spend only one hour of the working day for actual coding (although it did not provide confirmation and made this statement while advertising its own AI agent), and GitLab claimed that about 75% of developers’ working time is spent on tasks other than coding. Instead, in an interview with Business Insider, several veteran programmers claimed that spend almost half of their working time on coding