Not parent, but I'm working on a late '13 MBP, 8GB ram.

I spend basically all day doing Rails development, with MySQL, ElasticSearch, background job processing, etc. I'd be happier with 16gb, but tbh memory isn't the thing stalling my work (even with a lot of chrome tabs open) - it's usually waiting for my app to load to run some tests, or reloading my dev server.

I do mostly C++ dev work in Visual Studio, and occasionally run CAD/Engineering tools, in addition to processing large data files. ALso, I usually have 1-2 VMs running in the background (but they dont see much use). I used to think 16GB was enough, till I upgraded to 32GB. A lot of the benefit is derived from the fact that I never shutdown my PC, and so the cached data tends to stick around for a long time (last time I rebooted was around 75 days ago). I've run perfmon over the course of a week and watched my page faults drop as more and more stuff gets cached. I won't say its going to be the same for you but IMHO its worth a shot. You could at the very least test how much time you're spending on page faults over the course of a week or so since per-day savings would probably be minimal.

I use my MacBook 2015 mostly for my personal projects with few VMs running copies of web sites, compilers, QtCreator and Eclipse. This works nicely. On the other hand with things like Jupyter notebooks at work 16 GB is clearly a bare minimum when running algorithms on 100GB dataset..