I had a 32GB dev machine in my last job at a bank. 8GB is barely enough to run a full-on IDE, but if you also need to run wireshark, Geneos, outlook, big-ass excell sheets, several browsers with over a dozen tabs each, a bunch of communications tools, other office apps etc, etc, I'd regularly go above 20GB memory usage.

I was working app support really, with a fair bit of dev work as well, so needed to run a ton of different tools.

I'm not even at a tech company and requested 32GBs, as I sometimes have VS and Android Studio open, running mobile emulators and checking what is going on the API end. You add VMs to the mix and one really needs 32GBs. My company had no issues providing the ram. Plus, it is insanely cheap right now.

I am self employed, and invested the lump sum of 800€ (+ screen that I already head) for a reasonably beefy desktop machine. I'm not saying that 32G is the minimum required to run JetBrains IDEs well; I'm saying 8G is not enough and 32G is definitely enough to run it alongside a bunch of containers and other stuff.

I agree that JetBrains stuff is resource hungry (maybe excessively so); to me it is still worth using it for Java, C#, Python, iOS and Android. For C++ I prefer Qt Creator (though I must say that the idea of switching to CLion and having a consistent IDE experience across all platforms that I work on is tempting).

In my current role, I was given a laptop with 8GB. An additional 24GB mysteriously found it's way in there after a couple of days...

It depends on your use-case.

Add Docker, VM, development database server etc. to the bill, and a 32 GB machine is pretty reasonable for a dev.

All the Dev machines where I work have been 16GB for years, I wouldn't be surprised if we jumped to 32GB in the next hardware refresh.

These days 32G is starting to become more of a necessity as apps take more and more RAM. And if you're a gaming, 8G doesn't cut it anymore for some games;