Comparing Atlassian’s State of Developer Experience Reports for 2024 and 2025 (Category DevEx)
I have already covered Atlassian’s State of Developer Experience 2025. Since they have published the report since 2024, it is interesting to look at the trends and what changed over a year.
🤖 AI and time savings In 2024, most developers did not see much benefit from AI: roughly 62% said AI tools either did not improve their productivity or improved it only slightly. Leaders already had high hopes for AI as a way to increase productivity, while developers remained skeptical. The 2025 report paints a radically different picture: almost all developers, 99%, say AI saves them time, and 68% save more than 10 hours a week with AI tools. However, the question wording changed. In 2024, respondents were asked broadly about AI’s effect on productivity; in 2025, the survey measured specific hours saved. Developers in 2025 put that time into higher-value work: improving code quality, building features, and writing documentation.
📉 Time lost to inefficiency Both reports identify alarming amounts of time lost to friction and inefficient processes. In 2024, most engineers lost about a working day each week: 69% reported losing 8 hours or more to various inefficiencies. That “lost day” included downtime, waiting for answers, dealing with code debt, finding information, and other unproductive activities. In 2025, despite the time saved with AI, the picture worsened: 90% lost at least 6 hours a week to organizational obstacles, while half, 50%, lost 10 hours or more.
🧐 Productivity metrics and where effort goes Both studies emphasize that developer productivity is more than the amount of code written. In 2024, the authors noted that companies often measured output—tasks, commits, and so on—without tracking hidden losses to inefficiency. The survey showed that the main obstacles lay outside coding itself: bureaucracy, communication failures, documentation debt, and infrastructure complexity. Leaders recognized the importance of Developer Experience, but improvement efforts were inconsistent and did not always address the right problems. The 2025 report made this clearer: developers spent only about 16% of their working time coding, with the rest going to meetings, finding information, setting up environments, waiting, and related tasks.
❤️🔥 The perception gap between leaders and developers Both reports identify a worrying gap between leaders’ and individual engineers’ understanding of Developer Experience problems. In 2024, 44% of developers thought leaders understood the issues reducing their effectiveness, such as technical debt, outdated processes, and overload. Leaders often underestimated the losses: nearly half of technical leaders thought hiring could solve the problem. Developers saw process quality as the root cause; managers saw resources. In 2025, 63% of developers said leaders did not understand their current difficulties. Atlassian explains this as leadership rushing to “monetize” AI gains—expecting faster delivery from time saved—without removing existing friction. Leaders could conclude that faster AI-assisted work had solved the problem while developers were still stuck at the same bottlenecks.
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