Study of Development Managers

DevCrowd released the results of the 2025 study of development managers. As always, key findings:

✅ The management path in IT begins with the role of team lead or group lead
It is in these positions that specialists with up to three years of management experience most often work. As they gain experience, they move to development manager positions, and then to Head and C-level roles.

✅ The majority of team leads in the survey work with small teams: 68% of them lead groups of 1–7 people. This confirms that the team lead position is most often associated with tactical management, not large organizational structures.

✅ Writing code is no longer a typical responsibility for engineering managers. Only 39% of respondents indicated that they engage in development or other engineering work as part of their current role. For comparison, last year 47% of team leads reported this responsibility.

✅ As management responsibility increases, time spent on code decreases. Among those who spend at least 20% of their time on development, nearly 35% of team leads and over 40% of tech leads continue to actively write code; whereas among department heads, group heads, and especially CTOs, such cases are rare.

✅ One in three is not involved in the professional community. Among those who participate, most rate their level as "listener." Only one in ten proactively shares knowledge through articles and presentations and/or organizes specialized events.

✅ One in ten team leads is currently actively job searching — the share has grown from 6.7% to 10.1% over the year. Another 39% are not in a hurry but are open to offers, and 50.6% do not plan to change jobs.

✅ 60% of managers have completed at least one training course in the past year
Popular topics include developing soft skills, product and business skills, as well as technical development: architecture, engineering practices, DevOps. Courses on negotiation, hiring, public speaking, and AI tools in management were chosen less frequently.

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