Java hiring plans slip, survey says

Slightly more than half of Java shops surveyed (51%) have plans to add more Java developers in the coming year, down from 60% in 2024, according to a report by Perforce, a provider of Java development and devops tools. And while 34% plan to increase the Java tool budget in 2025, that compares to 42% that planned to do so in 2024.

These findings were cited in the company’s 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report, published March 4. Perforce, which offers the JRebel Java development tool, this year surveyed 731 developers, team leads, managers, and executives who work in the Java realm. While 51% said they planned to add Java developers in 2025, 16% had no plans to add to developer headcount and 32% were unsure. Thirty-four percent planned to increase the Java tool budget this year, compared to 42% last year.

In other findings, only 12% of respondents said they do not use AI tools, while 12% responded that their companies do not allow tje use of AI tools. Top AI tools among respondents included “generic juggernaut“ ChatGPT (used by 52%) and GitHub Copilot (used by 42%), with IDE-integrated AI tools trailing (used by 25%). Developers were most likely to turn to AI tools for code completion (60%) and refactoring (39%). Error detection (30%), documentation generation (28%), debugging assistance (26%), and automated testing (21%) were also cited as common use cases.

Elsewhere in the 2025 Java Developer Productivity Report:

61% of respondents use Java 17, 45% use Java 21, 35% use Java 8, and 32% use Java 11. These are the four most recent long-term support releases.

72% reported using Oracle distributions that are no longer supported including Java 11 and Java 8.

For main applications, use of Java 17 led the way at 61% while use of Java 7 or older was only 5%. Respondents also reported using Kotlin (10%), Groovy (7%), and Scala (3%) for their main applications.

For primary JRE/JDK (Java Runtime Environment/Java Development Kit) distribution, Oracle led the way at 42%, followed by OpenJDK at 35%, AdoptOpenJDK/Adoptium at 24%, Amazon Corretto at 23%, and Azul Zulu at 12%.

For Java IDE, JetBrains IntelliJ was tops at 84%, followed by Visual Studio Code at 31% and Eclipse at 28%. Eclipse notched 39% a year ago.