Coding on Holidays: New Year’s Edition [CHART]

In a previous post, we saw which industries had the most builds on December 24th and December 25th in 2015. In this post, we’ll see who had the most builds on New Year’s Day (Jan 1).

As before, this information is based on anonymized data from close to 20 million builds run on CircleCI in the past 12 months. To see what kinds of organizations were building the most on New Year’s Day 2016, we compared average holiday build volume to average non-holiday build volume across 29 industry groups:1

The top 5 categories

• Food & Staples Retailing: 46% of average daily build volume of non-holiday days in January
• Consumer Discretionary: 35%
• Materials: 27%
• Construction Materials: 23%
• Utilities: 23%

The bottom 5 categories

• Automobiles & Components: .8% of average daily build volume of non-holiday days in January
• Independent Power and Renewable Electricity Producers: 4%
• Diversified Financials: 4%
• Transportation: 7%
• Food, Beverage & Tobacco: 7%

The average build volume (across all industries) on New Year’s Day was about 12%: so across all industries, CircleCI users ran only about 12% as many builds as they would on an average January workday. As you can see below, this was not evenly distributed across industries with some building far more than the average, and some far less.2

For New Year’s Day builds, the Materials, Utilities, and Construction Materials groups have bounced back from their Christmas lows and are ready to start the New Year with a bang of activity. Transportation-linked industries, on the other hand, took it slow, as did Food & Beverage.

However, also for New Year’s Day, there was a huge difference between the top and bottom industries. CircleCI users in the Food & Staples Retailing industry ran 275% of the all-users build average, while Automobiles & Components ran less than 7%.

As a personal aside, none of these blog posts should be taken to mean that I think developers (or anyone else for that matter) should be working on holidays. It’s just interesting to see who does, and how much.

We’ll look deeper into this information, as well as other data provided by the close to 20 million builds run in 2016 on CircleCI, in future blog posts.

Footnotes

1. Industry groups included Automobiles & Components, Banks, Capital Goods, Commercial & Professional Services, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Durables & Apparel, Consumer Services, Consumer Staples, Diversified Consumer Services, Diversified Financial Services, Diversified Financials, Energy Equipment & Services, Food & Staples Retailing, Food Beverage & Tobacco, Health Care Equipment & Services, Household & Personal Products, Independent Power and Renewable Electricity Producers, Insurance, Materials, Media, Pharmaceuticals, Biotechnology & Life Sciences, Real Estate, Retailing, Software & Services, Technology Hardware & Equipment, Telecommunication Services, Transportation, Utilities. For reference to what kinds of organizations these industry groups might include, see the ClearBit definitions here. And keep in mind: if an industry group says “Automobiles & Components,” it will include auto companies in addition to any startups or companies making software for the automotive industry. ↩
2. of non-holiday days in January ↩

Originally published at circleci.com