Dev Nation Survey Sneak Peek: 3 Trends for South African tech in 2025

2024’s been another tough year for tech. Navigating what it all means for tech careers is a massive challenge when opinions are everywhere and data is scarce. To help bring much-needed transparency to our community, we’ve launched our 6th annual 2025 State of the Developer Nation survey.

Here’s a sneak peek from the survey data of three trends emerging for 2025.

1️. Fewer developers are working in remote jobs

At the start of this year, we started seeing a slow return to office movement (RTO) among tech companies. During this time, 17% of developers saw their policy change away from being fully remote.

We were expecting to see more developers working in an office at least some of the time in 2025, And now early data shows that the number of devs working in fully remote roles has fallen over the past year:

At the same time, we’re also seeing companies that choose to stay fully remote continue to embrace access to a wider talent pool.

More than half of tech professionals working for fully remote companies can work from anywhere in the world, while another 24% only need to be in the same country.

Less than 1 in 40 remote developers need to be in the same city as their current company.

2. Devs are using AI after hours for pet projects, not at work

Between 2023 and 2024, the number of devs who reported using an AI tool jumped from 35.4% to 51.9%. However, only a third said they used these tools in their roles.

We initially expected on-the-job AI use to increase as developers and their companies looked for productivity gains.

However, the early data shows that the number of developers using these tools at work has only increased slightly:

38.1% of developers say they’ve used an AI API in their roles this year, compared to 33.4% last year.

This picture starts to get worse when we look at AI coding assistants. While the majority of devs have some experience with these tools, just over 1 in 5 developers are using them at work.

Another 18.9% of devs working at companies use these tools but don’t necessarily use them in their roles.

3️. Developers’ career growth confidence is at a four-year low

Last year, devs’ confidence in their career development support was at an all-time low. The early data from the 2025 survey shows that there's even less confidence:

15.6% of developers don’t think they can continue growing at their current company.

At the same time, the incoming data shows the share of devs who believe they can continue growing at their current company has also dropped from 66.4% to 63.2%.

This all-time low career growth confidence can have major implications for companies looking to retain their best people in the new year, as a lack of growth opportunities is a major factor when it comes to leaving a role.

Create the dataset that lets you navigate tech careers and hiring with confidence in 2025.