UK businesses will struggle to attract talented developers over the next 12 months unless more are willing to embrace remote work, new research has warned.
Less than a quarter of available developer jobs in the UK come with an offer to work from home, according to tech recruitment platform CodinGame.
The company analysed 13,000 tech jobs across more than 100 UK towns and cities, excluding areas with less than 50 available developer job listings. Just 23% of full-time listings had an offer of remote work, rising to just 36% when roles listed as "temporarily remote" were included.
CodinGame believes that without an offer to work remotely, UK businesses will not be able to attract DevOps specialists, cloud experts, and other in-demand developer roles.
"It's concerning just how few developer positions are remote roles, with more than three-quarters of the 13,000 jobs we analysed being advertised as office-based," said Aude Barral, the CEO of CodinGame. "Even though the country is slowly coming out of lockdown, we would still have expected the number of companies offering remote programming roles to be higher."
"For example, when we polled HR professionals recently for our latest annual survey, almost half said they would offer developers the opportunity to work remotely full-time. We also polled developers, and 70% said they would like to work remotely if given the opportunity."
Manchester was listed as having the highest number of developer roles at 855, but just 268 (31%) of these offered the option to work remotely. Birmingham, however, had the highest proportion of remote roles, with 38% of its 330 listed vacancies. This was followed by Bath and Southampton, at 35% and 32% respectively.
| Location | Number of developer positions | Number of remote positions | % that are remote |
| Birmingham | 330 | 126 | 38.2 |
| Bath | 55 | 19 | 34.5 |
| Southampton | 95 | 30 | 31.6 |
| Manchester | 855 | 268 | 31.3 |
| York | 94 | 28 | 29.8 |
| Sheffield | 145 | 43 | 29.7 |
| Cardiff | 149 | 43 | 28.9 |
| Nottingham | 193 | 55 | 28.5 |
| Reading | 232 | 64 | 27.6 |
| Dundee | 71 | 19 | 268 |
"By limiting their searches to developers who can travel into the office, companies may find they'll struggle to fill highly specialised tech positions," Barral added. "Opening up their searches to include developers who aren't local and are able to work remotely, could enable companies to tap into a much larger tech talent pool, not just in the UK but globally."
