What 2024 Tech Hiring Survey Reveals About AI, Developer Preferences, and Job Security

CoderPad released the “State of Tech Hiring 2024” report, gathering feedback from more than 13,000 developers in 149 countries/regions and about 5,500 HR professionals in 143 countries/regions, studying developers’ job expectations, the evolution of tech recruiting processes, and hiring priorities and obstacles for 2024.

The report shows that 70% of developers believe AI will help reduce their workload, citing benefits such as code assistance, learning/tutorials, autocomplete/code generation, and documentation/API support. ChatGPT is the most widely used AI tool, followed by Copilot, Bard, Bing AI, etc., and 60% of developers want to use AI more at work.

However, 33% of surveyed developers do not use any AI tools at work: 29% distrust the technology, 28% face employer opposition, and a quarter consider AI unreliable or inefficient. While 43% are optimistic about AI’s impact, 23% remain skeptical and 6% fear it could affect their career or job prospects.

Despite 67% of developers and 38% of HR staff already using AI tools at work, its use in the hiring process remains controversial. Nearly a quarter (23%) of HR respondents view candidates’ AI tool usage as cheating. Only 8% of companies encourage AI use during recruitment, and 48% say its acceptability depends on the context.

Only 19% of developers would openly use AI during hiring, and one‑third consider using AI tools in interviews or technical tests to be cheating.

When asked about the most well‑known and in‑demand programming languages for hiring, the top ten are Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, SQL, C++, TypeScript, HTML/CSS, PHP, and C. The most popular frameworks are React and Node.js.

Other notable findings include:

36% of developers are not interested in taking on management responsibilities.

Developers want opportunities to sharpen technical skills, with the top three desired learning areas being web development, machine learning/deep learning, and game development.

Full‑stack, backend, and frontend roles remain the most in‑demand positions. Additionally, 21% of organizations plan to hire ML/AI experts in 2024, up from 18% last year.

Job security concerns are rising: 21% report a decreased sense of security compared with a year ago (versus 17% previously), 37% see no significant change, and 32% feel more secure.

Nearly half of developers are considering leaving their current job within the next 12 months.