How Switzerland makes software

Everything changes in time – the Swiss Developer Survey once again makes this clear. Initiated in 2019 and now in its fourth year, more than 800 Swiss developers gave their input this time around. All age groups, education levels, industries, and company sizes are represented. The selection is statistically significant .

Just as before, the majority of survey participants were between 25 and 44 years old – although there were now more 35 to 44-year-olds than 25 to 34-year-olds. So far so good. However, if this trend continues, issues such as skills shortages and a lack of new entrants will take on a whole new dimension over the next ten years. The fact that the majority of developers in our survey have now entered a new stage of life is evident in a number of ways. For example, back in 2019, only 40%  of participants had children. In 2023, this rose to 48%. At the same time, job satisfaction has actually increased very slightly, and people are staying in the same position for longer: 44% have now been working at the same company  for more than four years. Back in 2019, that figure was 39%. Stability becomes a more important consideration once people have had children  .

This concern also shows up again when looking at money: In considering the most important factors when identifying the right job, financial remuneration  took second place at 17%, compared to 11% in 2019.  This was directly followed by working atmosphere and company culture. Multiple responses could be selected to this question, so the results are always a mix, but there was still a marked difference to 2019 – when financial remuneration came in fifth. Similarly, pension options are now considered more important than event budgets.

One thing that has clearly increased is participants’ tendency to self-identify as a full-stack developer. In 2019, this was just under 41% of those surveyed, and the number rose to over 48% in 2023. This may be connected to the trend  toward single-page app development that kicked off few years ago, initially prompting some to split off from front-end developers. Over time, many desktop and mobile developers have added back-end development to their skillset – an area that has also become somewhat simpler  since then. And there you have it: more full-stack developers.

Remote work is on a slight decline: Less than half of our survey participants still work predominantly from home. However, significantly more than half continue to work from home   at least some of the time.

Another interesting observation: Only a comparatively small percentage of developers – 4% for sure, 14% to a limited extent – report being affected by internal company efforts to increase their proportion of remote workers located abroad.

ChatGPT immediately rose entered the top five websites used by developers in their day-to-day work. However, Stackoverflow, Google, and Github came up even more. VS Code continues its triumphal march among source code editors: it was already used by 51 percent back in 2019, and has now hit 66 percent. Even if all IntelliJ derivatives (PyCharm, PH-PStorm, RubyMine, Rider, etc.) are added together, they remain well below 20 percent. In terms of developer machines, Windows has fallen just under 50% for the first time, ceding some space to MacOS at 36%. At the same time Linux, with 14%, continues to have a strong showing on developers’ desktops.

Back in 2019, it was already clear that developers were more skeptical about blockchain than non-developers. This trend became even stronger in 2023. While 28% of respondents still considered blockchain to be entirely insignificant in 2019, this figure had risen to 44% by 2023.

Conversely, 16% considered blockchain to be important in 2019, compared to just 9% this year. This trend becomes even clearer when we compare developers’ expectations for the future: In 2019, just 12% believed blockchain would be entirely insignificant in five years' time. Compare this to today, and the figure has now risen to 34%.

Interestingly, back in 2019, more than 50% of developers believed that AI would be very important in five years’ time. Yet in 2020 and 2021, it seemed they gradually lost faith. Nevertheless, it should come as no surprise that the tides have turned yet changed again – in 2023, around 50% are back to believing in AI.

The proportion of those using Java has fallen from 58% to 51% from 2019 to 2023. There was a sharp increase in the use of TypeScript from 35% of participants back in 2019 to 48% in 2023, with a simultaneous drop in JavaScript use from 74% to 68%. Python has remained at an almost constant level, at 30% in 2023 compared to 31% in 2019. Rust, a language not even listed in 2019, has now hit 4%. This seems rather modest when you consider how often Rust comes up in the context of new and trendy programming languages. Go grew from 6 to 9% in the same period, probably owing to the growing cloud-native movement. Meanwhile, C and C++ have both fallen below the 10% mark.

There is a huge trend when it comes to databases, and that is Postgres. This may well be connected to the considerable dissatisfaction with Oracle. We’ve been hearing for some years now about companies’ endeavors to migrate everything away from Oracle. Postgres is clearly benefiting from this trend. In terms of newer applications, another factor is that Postgres is not only able to efficiently model traditional relational models, but also brings together excellent document storage (Jsonb) and time series storage solutions.
Overall, it can also be said that the top 5 database technologies have changed dramatically. In 2019, MySQL came in at 51%, ahead of MSSQL at 38%, Postgres at 35%, Oracle at 29% and SQLite at 28%. In 2023, Postgres is in the lead with 47%, ahead of MySQL at 37%, SQLite at 29%, MSSQL at 28%, and MariaDB at 25%. Meanwhile, Oracle has fallen to 8th place, also losing 30% of users according to the survey.

Containerization is a hot topic  these days, enabling granular, reproducible, highly efficient and isolated  software delivery. This was confirmed by the Swiss Developer Survey. Kubernetes has grown in use from 22 to 32% since 2019. The rise of Docker is even sharper, from 48 to 66%. This makes it the second-most widely used platform after Linux, pushing Windows Server and Desktop into third place.

It should be noted that the balance of company sizes represented in the survey has evened out a little. While SME developers were still slightly in the majority in 2019, the participants are now more evenly distributed between corporate and small business.  

There are few changes to remark upon here. Node.js (53%) and Angular (33%) are still the clear leaders. React rose from 20 to 26%, Vue.js from 13 to 17%, and Spring from 28 to 31%. Meanwhile, .NET and .NET Core have fallen back in the rankings: While these two still amassed 309 mentions between them back in 2019, this has fallen to 224 in 2023. ASP.NET has fallen out of the top 10, but Maven, now in 4th place, and Gradle, now in 6th place, have jumped quite far up the rankings. In all this evaluation, we must bear in mind that it can be hard to draw a consistent distinction between the framework and platform categories.

This article only covers a fraction of the findings from the current Swiss Developer Survey. The full report covers every aspect in much greater detail. You can access all results since 2019 for free via the swissmadesoftware app.

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The 4th swiss developer survey is presented by letsboot.ch, itsense and biconcepts.