Coding on Thanksgiving is more popular than you think
Many developers don’t take off Thanksgiving Day. They simply code less.
Developer activity remains high on Thanksgiving
The number of active full-time developers dropped just 23% below normal on Thursday.
More developers did not code the day after Thanksgiving. The number of active developers was 3 percentage points lower on Black Friday compared to Thanksgiving.
Code time fell sharply—for an entire week
Developers who coded on Thanksgiving coded far less than a typical workday. Active code time per developer—defined as the time spent actively writing and editing code in your editor or IDE—fell nearly 50% on Thanksgiving compared to prior periods.
Active code time per developer also fell sharply, more than 30%, on Monday and Tuesday prior to Thanksgiving Day.
Are developers burning out or trying to escape?
Developers are grappling with how to maintain work-life balance in the midst of COVID-19 and lockdowns. Many avoided travel and large gatherings over Thanksgiving. Without holiday plans, some workers likely found it easier to work through Thanksgiving.
Developers may have also turned to coding for entertainment. According to GitHub’s analysis of developer activity, open source activity has increased during the pandemic. The latest State of the Octoverse concludes that “open source is both a place to learn and create, and an important escape from work.” Developers are taking advantage of time off to tackle side projects or contribute to the open source community.
Did your team code on Thanksgiving? Tweet at us with your opinions.
About the results
We aggregated anonymized data from Software’s community of over 100,000 developers to analyze changes in behavior during Thanksgiving week.
Data is from developers using our Code Time plugins for VS Code, Atom, Sublime Text, PyCharm, IntelliJ, and WebStorm, among other code editors.
