2024年南非软件开发者生态洞察报告

State of the SoftwareDeveloper Nation Contents Introduction 2023 was another difficult year for the tech industry as it continued toweather a global economic downturn. Interest rates rose in responseto high inflation numbers, VC funding decreased again. Overall, itended up being one of the toughest years for funding in a decade. Taking every opportunity to seize back control is not without its risks.Companies will need to watch out for attrition as the market recovers.In the long term, all too drastic moves may also undermine theiremployer brand. While South African companies have avoided the brunt of theeffects, some still had to do layoffs. We’ve also started seeing localcompanies passing on the pressure to their remaining employees. For developers, it’s important to realise that applications to techjobs have tripled in the past year. It’s now significantly harder to getinterviews and the interviews are harder to pass. All in all, the balance of power has shifted in favour of companies.They’re starting to take back a lot of the control they gave up duringthe hottest-ever hiring market in 2021. We can see this playing out inthis year’s data: However, there are signs that the market is starting to recover slowly:Tech layoffs are still down relative to their peak and the numberof open tech jobs is recovering. I look forward to seeing how ourcommunity will leverage AI to make the next phase of growth evenbetter than the one before. •Salary band growth and annual increases have also slowed downas companies no longer need to compete for the best talent.•Over the past 12 months, 17% of developers lost their fullyremote status.•This is despite over half of surveyed developers saying they’dleave if they were forced to return full time. I hope this report provides you with insights that will help younavigate the shifting tech landscape with more confidence. Philip JoubertOfferZen Co-founder In this climate, it’s likely that many companies will continue todowngrade easy perks and conveniences to save money. South African Tech Trends Artificial Intelligence is the newco-pilot for South African developers AI is taking ZA developers’hearts by storm While many media companies predict the burst of the AI bubble,South African developers are still focussing on its potential. In fact, the percentage of developers who see it as the mostpromising industry has grown massively, from 50% to 68%. With evenmore advances in AI tools over the past 12 months, it’s easy to seewhy developers are betting on a bright future for AI: We’ve seen therelease of ChatGPT-4 and open source AI models like Mistral makemassive strides, reaching parity with GPT-3.5. AI is starting to play a role in virtually all industries. There are AIintegrations into virtually every app, from Microsoft Copilot, Miro andPhotoshop to Notion. One could even ask the question: Given thatit permeates every piece of technology and every industry, is it stillaccurate to consider AI an industry? Either way, devs are excited about this capacity for innovation. That’swhy the majority of South African software developers rank it as theirmost promising industry. Crypto’s fall continues Things may be looking up for AI but Crypto’s fall in popularitycontinues. The industry grew in importance and popularity each yearfrom 2019 to 2022. However, 2023 was the start of the Crypto winter: The value ofBitcoin crashed, X removed it’s support for NFTs, and multipleexchanges go bust or sued by the US government. has sued This downward trend looks set to continue going into 2024. Now,only 1 in 8 developers see it as a promising industry. Could that 1 in 8 be on to something? Bitcoin’s price has startedrecovering and is good news for developers who still hold ontocoins. If that trend continues, we could be looking at renewedinterest in the industry. AI is helping more developersdo their work While AI adoption in South Africa was still pretty low last year, nowover half of the software developers having worked with an AI API.The majority are also working with code-writing assistants in eithertheir role or personal projects. This shows that AI has a real impact on how developers do theirwork, not taking over their work. At the same time, working withmachine learning models remains a niche for South Africandevelopers: More than two thirds of devs haven’t built or trained amachine learning model. The majority of companies are aware of things like GPT4and the obvious stuff like customer service chat bots. Butthey’re still searching for their own killer use case withgenerative AI to create value for customers. Dan Daveyrecombinary AI is freeing up capacity forhigh-impact work Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT is the most widely used AI tool by developers,followed by Google’s Bard and image generator DALL-E. But, takinga closer look at how they’re using AI shows that South Africandevelopers are using AI to automate routine tasks and data analysis.This is freeing them up to fo