How long can you leave software development before you wake up in another world?
If you were a developer living in this year, how long could you disappear before coming back felt like waking up in another profession?
* Computed from a hand-weighted timeline of shifts. See how.
Year you fell asleep2026
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Patient: Developer Case file · 2026
Coma duration
DCT at time of sleep
How the reading is calculated
Each shift below gets a weight for how much it changed a typical developer’s working day, where 1.0 means your daily routine is different. Your coma time is how long after you fell asleep (mid-year) the shifts since then take to add up to 1.5. The slider highlights exactly which shifts those are.
If they haven’t added up yet, the reading is projected from the pace of change in the two years before you fell asleep, and marked with a “?”. Dates are roughly when each shift went mainstream, not when it launched. The weights are opinions; argue with those. The arithmetic is just arithmetic.
Developer Coma Time
noun abbr. DCT
The amount of time a software developer could completely leave the industry and return before the profession feels significantly unfamiliar and requires substantial adaptation.
Note 01
DCT does not measure how fast you can learn. It measures how fast there is something new to learn.
Note 02
Fundamentals age slowly. Workflows age quickly. Job descriptions, lately, age fastest of all.
Note 03
The scale is non-linear because the industry is. The last few markings are crowded for a reason.