PyCharm, by the virtue of running on JVM, doesn't take any more memory than allocated to it in VMOptions. So unless you go out of your way to give it too much memory, I am not sure PyCharm is going to take 14GB of memory. I am a heavy user of IntelliJ based products for a long time and I can't remember them taking enough memory to be a problem on a 16GB laptop.

Just out of curiosity, what was your colleague doing?

I have had IntelliJ open with multiple million+ line projects with thousands of source files and it hovers around 3GB. Its gotta be his settings. Java will use as much ram as you tell it to, it uses the extra ram to collect garbage less often.

Its super common to misconfigure Java to use all of your ram. You could have a terabyte and tell it to use everything and it will