MacBook Pro Late 2011 worth upgrading?
I have a Late 2011 MacBook Pro (2.4 Ghz) bought in 2012. I have upgraded it with a SSD and 8GB RAM. I still run El Capitan as with Sierra the fans kick in often. I even tried High Sierra, but its slow. I use Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEs on it and they run well without any issues.

If you want to do mobile development (iOS), I believe you have to settle with Sierra as High Sierra may run very hot with XCode and iOS simulators. And if you are running multiple intensive tasks, then it will be laggy.

One more issue with Sierra I found is that CPU Kernel issue. Most of the time CPU Kernel will be busy with 300-500% CPU usage. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, but the development environment will be old as High Sierra could be the last compatible OS for this MBP.