Programmers Aren’t Writing Green Code Where It’s Most Needed

“Based on our interviews, we initially theorized that practitioners with experience in mobile (‘battery life is very important, especially in mobile devices’), data center (‘any watt that we can save is either a watt we don’t have to pay for, or it’s a watt that we can send to another server’), and embedded (‘maximum power usage is limited so energy has a big influence on not only hardware but also software’) would more often have requirements or goals about energy usage than traditional practitioners (‘we always have access to power, so energy isn’t the highest priority’).”

This turned out to be accurate for only mobile developers, who used green practices more than any other group, with 53 percent reporting that they “almost always” or “often” wrote applications with energy usage requirements. For embedded and data center developers, 75 percent and 86 percent of those surveyed rarely or never programmed according to energy usage requirements, respectively.