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2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

318 points by sambrand 11y ago

michaelmior 11y ago
> JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language. I'm not convinced this conclusion applies to the software development community as a whole. s/earth/Stack Overflow/
- baldfat 11y ago
  I read it as: "Man, I better get over my hatred of JavaScript." (Started when building front ends to databases in 1999. Haven't really looked back and that is 100% my fault.
  - p4wnc6 11y ago
    I disagree. I'd much rather be forced to learn an entirely new profession and leave coding all together than to be required to write Javascript professionally. One thing this survey doesn't really touch on is the way the rise of Javascript is related to a fall in software quality. We write a lot more code now. More people write code. And a lot of that code sucks and it's a shame someone foolishly considers it productive labor output. And a lot of that code, the sucky stuff, is Javascript. Refusal to use Javascript is still a signal of a smart and quality-focused developer. Similar to refusal to use Mongo. I wish the SO survey didn't just measure what tech is popular among employers or what tech is paid well. Employers are notorious for incorrectly investing in the wrong tech, shoehorning things in, and declaring 'victory' when they deploy a bug-ridden, 1-star app or something. That kind of situation, which is common, should be down-weighted in the survey results, if only it were easier to collect that data.
    - m90 11y ago
      Cool story, bro, spread the gospel. Better keep people from easy access to programming and enjoy the beautiful software we had in the 90ies.
      - p4wnc6 11y ago
        The same phenomena existed in the 90s. Enterprise and corporate bureaucracy will always be the main driver in terms of which skill sets appear most in-demand. They have been since the dawn of computing. The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else. My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized by enterprise bureaucracy. But thoughtful people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever opening Visual Studio. And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money without ever writing a line of Javascript.
        douche 11y ago
        I would suspect that many of the grunt Javascript jobs would have been grunt VB6 jobs 20 years ago.
        manyxcxi 11y ago
        So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP? Perl? Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems. Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'. Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers (some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use them. If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else. People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get left behind and forgotten. Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.
- deleted 11y ago
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- var_explained 11y ago
  It's also the most common language on GitHub in terms of both # of repositories and total pushes: http://githut.info/ http://githut.info/. Why is it hard to believe?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- wyldfire 11y ago
  I think it might actually be the case. It's a testament to how valuable it is to have a ubiquitous platform (especially one that's fairly uniform) on which to run your software. But, sure, SO is extrapolating here.
- jsight 11y ago
  Well, anyone who has ever written a webpage with a single script has used it. I suspect that accounts for the overwhelming majority of developers now. I doubt that it means that majority is also writing the majority of their code in it.
derrickdirge 11y ago
>We’ll also be keeping commas outside quotation marks, because that’s what developers do. +1 This syntax feels so right to me, but I feel bad about myself when I use it. No longer!
wimagguc 11y ago
> for the third year in a row, "full-stack developer" was the most common response [for occupation] Might be a loaded question, but doesn't full-stack mean just "web developer"? From the survey, "Full-stack developers are comfortable coding with 5 to 6 major languages or frameworks (vs. 4 for everyone else)" -- with knowing a bit of Wordpress that's fairly easy to collect: php, sql, html, javascript, css. Done. Or full-stack is the new ninja?
- ruraljuror 11y ago
  I don't think so. I think the self distinction is between developers who work exclusively on the front end or back end of websites vs those who do it all. My guess would be the correlation between the self identification has less to do with developer skill than to team/business size. If you are on a team of two or three people, and changes need to be made to the database, JS, and server-side code, you're going to be working across the full stack in a variety of languages. I don't think this approach lends itself to mastery or specialization, and so if you're like me you will be using SO to find out how to do simple things in JS. But I see your point, the commentary suggests full-stack developers are more skilled.
  - josteink 11y ago
    > you are on a team of two or three people, and changes need to be made to the database, JS, and server-side code, you're going to be working across the full stack in a variety of languages. So basically a web developer then. Right.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  I think it's more of a distinction with 'front-end developer', who is someone that works exclusively on the front-end - e.g. angular, ember, react, etc. This role barely existed 5+ years ago, and every web developer was more of a full-stack developer. Nowadays you could focus only on the front-end side and not need bother with a back-end ever.
  - Illniyar 11y ago
seren 11y ago
As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are "web developers". Is this the distribution in the global developer population as well ? Or is this a bias due to Stackoverflow which by its very nature is web centric ?
- d0lph 11y ago
  Web is where the new stuff is happening, if you see a new framework or library 90% of the time it is some JS/browser based language. Thus this leads to a larger online community of people trying to make stuff work, and in the end more SO users. Not to mention web apps being the new big thing. To further that I think a lot of devs that tinker with things outside of work tend to tinker with web stuff more.
  - chadcmulligan 11y ago
    Web is where the new stuff was happening. The browser is very constrained - most of the 'new' stuff is to get around the browser shortcomings - e.g. react, angular. These are to solve front end problems that have been long solved on desktop environments (.Net, Delphi, VB maybe even Obj C though I'm not a fan) Actual new tech is in the mobile sphere now imho, or server side AI, very little of this is web development except for the occasional front end for said apps.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      As a former desktop developer, current web developer I think WebAssembly has a decent shot at changing that. The tools I use now are significantly more crude in the business domain/for line of business stuff than I was using in the days of Delph 5. Personally, give me something that can run Qt (or something like it) and Python in the browser and I'm 95% to been in heaven.
- manyxcxi 11y ago
  I see it kind of like this: 10 years ago when I had my first official job post college we needed some tools for interacting with our manufacturing data sets. I opened up Visual Studio and created some Windows applications and installers. Then we deployed a web service written in Java (because at the time any web server we had was *nix) to create some additional functionality and hooked the desktop apps up to it. Then we swapped out the desktop apps because too many people were not upgrading and getting all kinds of errors. Or desktop support was getting too many calls because the end user had a borked environment. This was all many moons ago and happened in the span of 18 months. I started out as a desktop and server API application developer. Today I haven't written an exe since I left that job but to build UIs over the years I had to learn HTML/CSS/JS. That is, I feel, we got the 'original' full stack developer.
mixedmath 11y ago
I remain as surprised as last year about the prevalence of Notepad++. My circles do not intersect these users, I think.
- ashmud 11y ago
  Windows + free + low system impact / short install time. Makes it a goto in a lot of cases on the Windows platform.
- Delmania 11y ago
  For Windows, Notepad++ fits nicely for situations where "I need more than Notepad, but less than an IDE". It's a great example of the a well done pieces of free software on Windows. I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime, and none of them beat N++.
  - suprfnk 11y ago
    > I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime, and none of them beat N++. This ofcourse being entirely subjective.
    - drakenot 11y ago
      This really surprises me. What can N++ do that Vim or Emacs couldn't do? Or what is easier at least?
      - Semiapies 11y ago
        Be easy, straightforward, and immediately productive for someone used to Windows apps. I love Emacs, but it took a deliberate, determined effort and time sacrificed to get productive in it, so that I didn't feel like I was handicapping myself.
      - Cthulhu_ 11y ago
        Vim / Emacs have a very steep learning curve, and highly unintuitive, doubly so if you've rarely worked with a commandline.
santiagobasulto 11y ago
I don't see a lot of Ruby. What's going on?
- seren 11y ago
  Ruby is part of the "Losers" in the Trending Tech. But so is Rust that is also the most Loved. The trend is only the number of upvotes in a topic year to year. But this is always hard to interpret : does it mean that all basic questions have been asked so there is less activity or is it due to a drop in questions because lack of interest ?
  - myth_drannon 11y ago
    Better proxy of a need/popularity for particular tech would be stats of stackoverflow careers tags not the questions
- sotojuan 11y ago
  Use of Ruby is probably mostly for Rails and while Rails is still cool it's not as big as it was before. There's competition.
Cshelton 11y ago
II. Most Loved 1. Rust 2. Swift That's interesting and cool. I have to agree myself.
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  Most loved top 5: 1. Rust 2. Swift 3. F# 4. Scala 5. Go
  - myth_drannon 11y ago
    I would say "Most Hyped", perception of what we love is shaped by the internet opinions. I doubt many people do Rust as part of their job or even hobby projects. On the other hand Sharepoint and Objective-C is part of our day to day routine...
    - jinst8gmi 11y ago
      The question was based on languages which you currently use and whether you would like to continue using them, little to do with "Most Hyped" or "Internet opinions"
    - hhandoko 11y ago
      I... Love Scala. It's just a really flexible language, while it has its warts, I feel they almost got it in combining the best of FP and OO. I was a SharePoint developer in previous life. End-users love SharePoint, but it's a headache to maintain and debug. I think there is only a very small use-case where you will actually need some *.wsp developed. I use Nintex Workflow + Forms the rest of the time. That being said, SharePoint devs gets paid well :)
deleted 11y ago
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SloopJon 11y ago
I see QA broken out as an occupation type in several graphs, including 11.6% of women. Overall, however, it's apparently lumped into Other, which would put it at less than the 0.1% who are BI or data warehousing experts, or machine learning developers. Really? No XY QA on SO? Pretty sure the math doesn't add up, though: * 5.8% of the 56,033 respondents were women * 49,525 overall specified an occupation type, so let's assume 88% of the women did as well * 11.6% of the women specified QA * .1% overall specified machine learning That's 56033 * .058 * .116 * .88 ~ 331 women QA alone, compared to 49525 * .001 ~ 49 machine learning developers.
fweespee_ch 11y ago
> The average developer is 29.6 years old. The median is 27. Does anyone else find this concerning given all the talk of age bias in tech?
- wyldfire 11y ago
  Well, even if there weren't a problem with age bias I would expect the median to be skewed lower. The details indicate that not all respondents are professionals. This could include youths, still in secondary school who are learning to program. But if the age distribution of people is such that the median age of humans were 27, it shouldn't concern us that the median age of this population of survey respondents is 27. I don't know what the human population distribution is but I took a quick peek at the US census bureau and it seems to indicate much more young people than older. I suppose that shouldn't really be surprising.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Nope. A lot of people that identify as 'developer' move on to other roles such as team lead or architect or, if they're lucky, retire before they hit 40. There's also the bias of stack overflow's users, of course; I can imagine that experienced devs visit SO less and thus never saw the survery (I know I didn't, and I still occasionally visit it)
- dagw 11y ago
  Those numbers are for the average SO user, not the average developer. Developers who've been developing for 20 years before SO showed up on the scene are less likely to make SO part of their development routine and less likely to fill out surveys about current programming trends.
- esmi 11y ago
  That caught my eye as well so I googled past surveys to see how the results have shifted. What was more interesting to me is the 2016 distribution is very comparable to the 2013 distribution. But then again this survey hasn't been going on for that long. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16C6ZeNSvd-qIg45J9E-vx2YCsD8w5oZaSTUtJ-52e-w/edit#gid=1077300498 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16C6ZeNSvd-qIg45J9E-v...
hitekker 11y ago
> 10% of respondents self-identified as Ninjas. Real ninjas don’t tell you they’re ninjas. They just sneak up on you and slit your throat, which generally constitutes "hostile workplace environment." Ah, good wit. Very nice write up!
- agentgt 11y ago
  My company makes recruiting software so I talk and deal with many recruiters. I have to say I severely cringe every time a recruiter says "Rockstar" or "Ninja" (in a job description or ask if I am one). Just imagine using those terms for a talented medical doctor or lawyer. "Microservice" is quickly becoming another new recruiting term that I am beginning to despise. At least "agile" is mostly dead... mostly... Speaking of which what ever happened to "Scotty", "Rocket scientist" or "Macgyver" (those were the sexy euphemisms back when I started software dev). They were far more apropo.
  - sciurus 11y ago
    Maybe we've just replaced "agile" with "devops".
    - SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
      I have heard a candidate for a software engineer position talk with straight face about his current workplace's "devops team" and handing off software to them. So maybe it's getting that way.
      - jedberg 11y ago
        If this were reddit this is where I would post a "The force doesn't work that way!" memes. I can't stand it when people ask about a "devops team". That's not devops then! That just means your sysadmins can code too. Now, if they are asking about a devops software team, that's a different story.
        11y ago
Jommi 11y ago
What really hit me was the graph about valuing salary[1] On one hand it looks like there is a drastic difference: Developers in Finland and Sweden don't care about their salary! But looking at the Y axis reveals that the difference from the mean is about 15 percentfigures. On the other hand, even that is quite a lot. It also allows us to make sweeping statements like Finland's coders are undervalued (?) or that over half of the Developers in Finland or Sweden did not value Salary. cool cool! [1]https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#money-matters-more-in-some-countries https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#mon...
saosebastiao 11y ago
Just want to point out that the top 4 most loved languages are ML derived/dialects. And poorly utilized. When is the rest of the software world gonna catch up to this?
OJFord 11y ago
Interesting that: - JS ranks high in 'wanted' to develop - JS doesn't appear in 'love' developing - CoffeeScript ranks high in 'dread' to continue to develop Big discrepancy in appeal for people on the outside looking in compared to those using it!
- ChrisDutrow 11y ago
  Yeah, and a big endorsement for Rust - at the top of the "love" list.
- onestone 11y ago
  To be fair, JS appears in 'loved' as Node.js.
  - sotojuan 11y ago
    Sounds right to me. I love writing backend, services, etc in Node but even with libraries I love like React there's a sigh coming out when I start working on a browser app.
  - OJFord 11y ago
    Ah, I overlooked that. Though - without checking the original questions - that still suggests an element of "came for JS; stayed for Node".
    - onestone 11y ago
      Uncertain. There could be other JS-related technologies below the cut - React, Redux, etc.
santiagobasulto 11y ago
Fun fact. In Argentina the previous government used to give subsidies to McDonald's to keep the BigMac cheap, so these numbers around the world comparing salary to the BigMac index would look better.
- shawkinaw 11y ago
  This is not too surprising given their other statistical creativity [0]. [0] http://www.economist.com/node/21548242 http://www.economist.com/node/21548242
  - santiagobasulto 11y ago
    INDEC is the government office in charge of carrying on the statistic (inflation, etc). They lied us for 4 years (with the previous government). They've shut it down completely 3 months ago (with the new government) and they're supposedly working to reopen it with legit information. We'll see.
- bulatb 11y ago
  Did you mean to comment in the fast food automation thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11304628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11304628
  - LoneWolf 11y ago
    I would say this is because the reference to the big mac index on the stack overflow post.
    - santiagobasulto 11y ago
      Yeah, exactly. "How many big macs can you buy with your salary".
- hitekker 11y ago
  A very fun fact indeed! Here are some sources to go with it: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_are_cheap_in_argentina.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_... http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-mac-attack/?_r=0 http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-...
hjalle 11y ago
Finding it a little suprising that C# is still decreasing in popularity, despite Microsofts recent efforts: 2013 - 44.7% 2014 - 37.6% 2015 - 31.6% 2016 - 30.9%
- phhlho 11y ago
  I wonder if it's actually decreasing in popularity or StackOverflow is just becoming increasingly popular with other languages. Looking at the number of responses to that question, there are lots more people taking the survey in the last two years! 2013 - 8042 2014 - 6537 2015 - 21982 2016 - 49397
- dhogan 11y ago
  Well. It didn't decrease as much. Perhaps it's just taking a moment to reverse the momentum.
- icefox 11y ago
  There is probably a correlation to the slow rise of the mac platform and the slow fall of the OS X platform. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-desktop-operating-system http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech... There are a ton of developers that will choose whatever language they have available and if developers are switching to mac they wont be reaching for C#. Then you have those that have moved on to F#. Objective-C has the same problem for those that have moved to swift. It is weird to think that next year perhaps 1/3 of SO developers will be on OS X. That is such a huge amount. And in the last decade Linux has absolutely won the server market. It is going to take some time for the clr on Linux project to stop the bleed from projects that moved off c# just to move off of Windows servers. Link to the full answers about tech from parent: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-most-popular-technologies http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...
- jinst8gmi 11y ago
  Perhaps Microsoft's reasons for their "recent efforts" are becoming more obvious to you...
shawkinaw 11y ago
What I want to know is, how many pennies were in the piggy bank? My guess was 176.
- benjaminhodgson 11y ago
  http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-survey-how-many-pennies-were-there http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-sur...
  - shawkinaw 11y ago
    Damn, I was way off. Guess I badly misjudged my spherical pig radius.
- gnrlbzik 11y ago
  I totally forgot that they even asked that, even more I forgot what my educated guess was.... Shame on me.
rickhanlonii 11y ago
It's interesting to see that over 34.5% of developers surveyed use some flavor of a JetBrains IDE: Intellij - 17% PhpStorm - 7.4% PyCharm - 6.8% RubyMine - 1.7% WebStorm - 1.6% --- Total - 34.5% This makes the Intellij IDE the third most used environment surveyed. If you're not using a text editor, chances are you're using a JetBrains IDE. I'd be interested in seeing the text editor vs IDE breakdown (broken down by age and experience) once the full data is released.
- zippergz 11y ago
  Were people only allowed to pick one? If not, I'd assume the total is lower than that since some people probably use more than one of them.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Yeah. I've used multiple ones for years. Especially now that they have the license that gives you access to all of them, I prefer to use the language-specific one unless I'm doing a project that requires multiple languages.
    - manyxcxi 11y ago
      I've definitely noticed the language specific ones are a little nicer with automating some of those workflows that are very specific to the language. Like starting a new PHP project in PHP Storm vs IDEA
- marklubi 11y ago
  Don't forget about Android Studio at 13% http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-android-studio-faq/ http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-and...
- arvinsim 11y ago
  I have used Notepad++, Sublime, Vim, Spacemacs and the Jetbrains suite. If I want to do a large enough project, the Jetbrains suite really can't be beaten in terms of just getting things done IMO.
Illniyar 11y ago
From the looks of it Ruby has really lost it shine. It doesn't appear at all in the "most popular technologies, not even in back-end, and it lost 6% in "trending tech". It also doesn't appear in any other metrics. Is it really a trend or that SO's community is not representative of Ruby practitioners ?
- razvanh 11y ago
  I noticed the same. Maybe the results are skewed a little bit by the SO audience but I think it's a real trend.
- waylandsmithers 11y ago
  My personal impression was that Rails has matured and there aren't as many open problems at this point-- there are agreed upon patterns and gems for most things you want to do in creating a web app-- or at least a relevant SO answer that is the first thing that comes up when you google a problem or error message. I know that isn't exactly what this question was measuring but I'd expect engagement for Ruby in general to fall on SO. Compare that to the current wild wild west of JS frameworks where everyone seems to be doing their own thing.
- ksec 11y ago
  Well the SO community is definitely the representative of Web Developers community. And since Ruby is mostly Rails, and Rails is a web development stack, this tell a lot. And I think that is the biggest problem with the Ruby communities in general, NO one cares about Ruby is dying. Not Matz, not DHH.
deleted 11y ago
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eranation 11y ago
Very happy to see Scala both in the "Loved" and also in the "top salaries in US", and same goes for Apache Spark. I made a bet on Scala more than 5 years ago and it finally starts to pay off... although the Scala job pool is only a fraction of the JS one.
- hellofunk 11y ago
  Here I thought it was referring to the Spark programming language.
whybroke 11y ago
Apparently the last 15 years of your working life you will be more rare than a woman programmer (3% vs 5.8%) It is absolutely fantastic the gender issue is being thought about at long last. But it is absolutely horrifying the ageism issue is not. Or worse, is as glibly explained away as past discrimination used to be.
- kibwen 11y ago
  It might also be partly explained by selection bias among SO's audience. At my first real job there was no other developer there below 40, and a few approaching retirement age (indeed, I was brought on to replace a developer who had retired). But I was the only one who used SO, and really the only one who turned to the internet for answers at all rather than reaching for the books on their shelves. (And also, our proportion of female developers was way, way higher than 5%.) Older developers are certainly out there, but they're woefully underrepresented in open source.
akavi 11y ago
Am I really that much of an outlier in loving coffeescript? I know a lot of people don't like the extra translation effort to debugging, and some aren't fond of significant whitespace, but I'm surprised that that's enough to make it into the top 5 most dreaded. Is there something else I'm missing?
- robocaptain 11y ago
  Right there with you. I was generally aware (mostly from HN) that it seemed less popular than when I started using it -- but _dread_? Surprising. I really enjoy it.
  - josteink 11y ago
    I think dread is warranted. Seeing Coffescript is enough for me to completely disregard and abandon a project I otherwise perceived interesting.
    - robocaptain 11y ago
      Can I ask why? Just out of legitimate curiosity. I don't work with a lot of other developers.
      - josteink 11y ago
        I think it's ugly. It introduces uncertainty about the exact semantics of statements (as in does this code really do what I think it does?). It doesn't add any capabilities which JavaScript doesn't have. It makes debugging more complex, because errors are not actually happening in the code you wrote, but code a compiler wrote based on something else. It introduces indirection and complexity, while adding zero value. As such it's on overall a negative value proposition, and that's everything it takes for me to decide something is not worth it. I find it a perfectly rational decision and attitude. While I'm not a fan per se, at least other transpired languages like typescript and clojurescript at least adds new capabilities to justify the additional complexity.
vehementi 11y ago
If 10% identify as Ninja, and 17% of ninjas use windows phone, that seems to contradict this: > We received 59 responses from Windows Phone Mobile Developers (.1%).
- hhandoko 11y ago
  It's users vs developers. 1.7% of respondents are WP users (10% x 17%), and only 0.1% of respondents are WP developers.
vdaniuk 11y ago
Atom adoption among SO developers increased from 2% in 2015 to 12% in 2016. VS Code is at 7.2% and it's not even out of beta. Both Atom and VS Code are built on Electron so it seems that web tech for building code editors and IDEs is getting really popular.
dionidium 11y ago
"95% of developers identify as either a Developer, Programmer, Engineer, Senior Developer or Full-Stack Developer. Embedded Application Developers are most likely to identify as Engineers. Graphics Programmers are most likely to identify as Programmers. But Developer is the runaway choice here. It’s our top choice, too." Good. This has always been a very silly thing to have to argue about. The people who care a lot about this topic are saying more about themselves by caring so much than any of the above titles would say about what they do.
rfrey 11y ago
Half of all respondents have 5 years experience or less. That seems likely to colour a lot of the other responses.
jorgecurio 11y ago
hey guys I want to learn node.js, and react.js where's a good primer on learning these things along with javascript fundamentals?
jonesb6 11y ago
If 10% of developers on SO are students, and 2.5% graduate every year, does that mean every 10 years the population of developers increases by 25%? Do 25% of developers retire every 10 years?
- kabouseng 11y ago
  Well actually close. If you have 40 years of productive work in you (20 years to 60 then retirement), then yes every 10 years 25% of the workforce does retire. But I would guess that those 10% of students are heavily skewed to students in their final year of study. Second point is that not all undergraduate courses are 4 years, some are 3 years, so probably closer to 7.5% of students on SO graduate every year. Which might indicate that the software development field is growing in terms of people active in the field. *Then again software development is a young persons game, so "retirement" out of the industry might be higher since a lot of people will retire to other fields / management positions.
executesorder66 11y ago
> Worldwide, developers with Masters degrees have the highest average salary. Developers with industry certifications and PhDs are also paid more than most other developers. Stay in school, kids But in the graph masters was second to "mentorship program" Can someone give an example of one of these programs? Is this just another name for an internship?
bobisme 11y ago
I'm surprised average hours per week or per year wasn't on the list. This also just confirms how grossly underpaid I am.

318 points by sambrand 11y ago

> JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language. I'm not convinced this conclusion applies to the software development community as a whole. s/earth/Stack Overflow/

baldfat 11y ago
I read it as: "Man, I better get over my hatred of JavaScript." (Started when building front ends to databases in 1999. Haven't really looked back and that is 100% my fault.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I disagree. I'd much rather be forced to learn an entirely new profession and leave coding all together than to be required to write Javascript professionally. One thing this survey doesn't really touch on is the way the rise of Javascript is related to a fall in software quality. We write a lot more code now. More people write code. And a lot of that code sucks and it's a shame someone foolishly considers it productive labor output. And a lot of that code, the sucky stuff, is Javascript. Refusal to use Javascript is still a signal of a smart and quality-focused developer. Similar to refusal to use Mongo. I wish the SO survey didn't just measure what tech is popular among employers or what tech is paid well. Employers are notorious for incorrectly investing in the wrong tech, shoehorning things in, and declaring 'victory' when they deploy a bug-ridden, 1-star app or something. That kind of situation, which is common, should be down-weighted in the survey results, if only it were easier to collect that data.
  - m90 11y ago
    Cool story, bro, spread the gospel. Better keep people from easy access to programming and enjoy the beautiful software we had in the 90ies.
    - p4wnc6 11y ago
      The same phenomena existed in the 90s. Enterprise and corporate bureaucracy will always be the main driver in terms of which skill sets appear most in-demand. They have been since the dawn of computing. The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else. My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized by enterprise bureaucracy. But thoughtful people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever opening Visual Studio. And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money without ever writing a line of Javascript.
      - douche 11y ago
        I would suspect that many of the grunt Javascript jobs would have been grunt VB6 jobs 20 years ago.
      - manyxcxi 11y ago
        So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP? Perl? Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems. Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'. Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers (some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use them. If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be using something else. People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get left behind and forgotten. Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.
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var_explained 11y ago
It's also the most common language on GitHub in terms of both # of repositories and total pushes: http://githut.info/ http://githut.info/. Why is it hard to believe?
- deleted 11y ago
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wyldfire 11y ago
I think it might actually be the case. It's a testament to how valuable it is to have a ubiquitous platform (especially one that's fairly uniform) on which to run your software. But, sure, SO is extrapolating here.
jsight 11y ago
Well, anyone who has ever written a webpage with a single script has used it. I suspect that accounts for the overwhelming majority of developers now. I doubt that it means that majority is also writing the majority of their code in it.

derrickdirge 11y ago

>We’ll also be keeping commas outside quotation marks, because that’s what developers do. +1 This syntax feels so right to me, but I feel bad about myself when I use it. No longer!

wimagguc 11y ago

> for the third year in a row, "full-stack developer" was the most common response [for occupation] Might be a loaded question, but doesn't full-stack mean just "web developer"? From the survey, "Full-stack developers are comfortable coding with 5 to 6 major languages or frameworks (vs. 4 for everyone else)" -- with knowing a bit of Wordpress that's fairly easy to collect: php, sql, html, javascript, css. Done. Or full-stack is the new ninja?

ruraljuror 11y ago
I don't think so. I think the self distinction is between developers who work exclusively on the front end or back end of websites vs those who do it all. My guess would be the correlation between the self identification has less to do with developer skill than to team/business size. If you are on a team of two or three people, and changes need to be made to the database, JS, and server-side code, you're going to be working across the full stack in a variety of languages. I don't think this approach lends itself to mastery or specialization, and so if you're like me you will be using SO to find out how to do simple things in JS. But I see your point, the commentary suggests full-stack developers are more skilled.
- josteink 11y ago
  > you are on a team of two or three people, and changes need to be made to the database, JS, and server-side code, you're going to be working across the full stack in a variety of languages. So basically a web developer then. Right.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
I think it's more of a distinction with 'front-end developer', who is someone that works exclusively on the front-end - e.g. angular, ember, react, etc. This role barely existed 5+ years ago, and every web developer was more of a full-stack developer. Nowadays you could focus only on the front-end side and not need bother with a back-end ever.
- Illniyar 11y ago

seren 11y ago

As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are "web developers". Is this the distribution in the global developer population as well ? Or is this a bias due to Stackoverflow which by its very nature is web centric ?

d0lph 11y ago
Web is where the new stuff is happening, if you see a new framework or library 90% of the time it is some JS/browser based language. Thus this leads to a larger online community of people trying to make stuff work, and in the end more SO users. Not to mention web apps being the new big thing. To further that I think a lot of devs that tinker with things outside of work tend to tinker with web stuff more.
- chadcmulligan 11y ago
  Web is where the new stuff was happening. The browser is very constrained - most of the 'new' stuff is to get around the browser shortcomings - e.g. react, angular. These are to solve front end problems that have been long solved on desktop environments (.Net, Delphi, VB maybe even Obj C though I'm not a fan) Actual new tech is in the mobile sphere now imho, or server side AI, very little of this is web development except for the occasional front end for said apps.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    As a former desktop developer, current web developer I think WebAssembly has a decent shot at changing that. The tools I use now are significantly more crude in the business domain/for line of business stuff than I was using in the days of Delph 5. Personally, give me something that can run Qt (or something like it) and Python in the browser and I'm 95% to been in heaven.
manyxcxi 11y ago
I see it kind of like this: 10 years ago when I had my first official job post college we needed some tools for interacting with our manufacturing data sets. I opened up Visual Studio and created some Windows applications and installers. Then we deployed a web service written in Java (because at the time any web server we had was *nix) to create some additional functionality and hooked the desktop apps up to it. Then we swapped out the desktop apps because too many people were not upgrading and getting all kinds of errors. Or desktop support was getting too many calls because the end user had a borked environment. This was all many moons ago and happened in the span of 18 months. I started out as a desktop and server API application developer. Today I haven't written an exe since I left that job but to build UIs over the years I had to learn HTML/CSS/JS. That is, I feel, we got the 'original' full stack developer.

mixedmath 11y ago

I remain as surprised as last year about the prevalence of Notepad++. My circles do not intersect these users, I think.

ashmud 11y ago
Windows + free + low system impact / short install time. Makes it a goto in a lot of cases on the Windows platform.
Delmania 11y ago
For Windows, Notepad++ fits nicely for situations where "I need more than Notepad, but less than an IDE". It's a great example of the a well done pieces of free software on Windows. I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime, and none of them beat N++.
- suprfnk 11y ago
  > I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime, and none of them beat N++. This ofcourse being entirely subjective.
  - drakenot 11y ago
    This really surprises me. What can N++ do that Vim or Emacs couldn't do? Or what is easier at least?
    - Semiapies 11y ago
      Be easy, straightforward, and immediately productive for someone used to Windows apps. I love Emacs, but it took a deliberate, determined effort and time sacrificed to get productive in it, so that I didn't feel like I was handicapping myself.
    - Cthulhu_ 11y ago
      Vim / Emacs have a very steep learning curve, and highly unintuitive, doubly so if you've rarely worked with a commandline.

santiagobasulto 11y ago

I don't see a lot of Ruby. What's going on?

seren 11y ago
Ruby is part of the "Losers" in the Trending Tech. But so is Rust that is also the most Loved. The trend is only the number of upvotes in a topic year to year. But this is always hard to interpret : does it mean that all basic questions have been asked so there is less activity or is it due to a drop in questions because lack of interest ?
- myth_drannon 11y ago
  Better proxy of a need/popularity for particular tech would be stats of stackoverflow careers tags not the questions
sotojuan 11y ago
Use of Ruby is probably mostly for Rails and while Rails is still cool it's not as big as it was before. There's competition.

Cshelton 11y ago

II. Most Loved 1. Rust 2. Swift That's interesting and cool. I have to agree myself.

jinst8gmi 11y ago
Most loved top 5: 1. Rust 2. Swift 3. F# 4. Scala 5. Go
- myth_drannon 11y ago
  I would say "Most Hyped", perception of what we love is shaped by the internet opinions. I doubt many people do Rust as part of their job or even hobby projects. On the other hand Sharepoint and Objective-C is part of our day to day routine...
  - jinst8gmi 11y ago
    The question was based on languages which you currently use and whether you would like to continue using them, little to do with "Most Hyped" or "Internet opinions"
  - hhandoko 11y ago
    I... Love Scala. It's just a really flexible language, while it has its warts, I feel they almost got it in combining the best of FP and OO. I was a SharePoint developer in previous life. End-users love SharePoint, but it's a headache to maintain and debug. I think there is only a very small use-case where you will actually need some *.wsp developed. I use Nintex Workflow + Forms the rest of the time. That being said, SharePoint devs gets paid well :)

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SloopJon 11y ago

I see QA broken out as an occupation type in several graphs, including 11.6% of women. Overall, however, it's apparently lumped into Other, which would put it at less than the 0.1% who are BI or data warehousing experts, or machine learning developers. Really? No XY QA on SO? Pretty sure the math doesn't add up, though: * 5.8% of the 56,033 respondents were women * 49,525 overall specified an occupation type, so let's assume 88% of the women did as well * 11.6% of the women specified QA * .1% overall specified machine learning That's 56033 * .058 * .116 * .88 ~ 331 women QA alone, compared to 49525 * .001 ~ 49 machine learning developers.

fweespee_ch 11y ago

> The average developer is 29.6 years old. The median is 27. Does anyone else find this concerning given all the talk of age bias in tech?

wyldfire 11y ago
Well, even if there weren't a problem with age bias I would expect the median to be skewed lower. The details indicate that not all respondents are professionals. This could include youths, still in secondary school who are learning to program. But if the age distribution of people is such that the median age of humans were 27, it shouldn't concern us that the median age of this population of survey respondents is 27. I don't know what the human population distribution is but I took a quick peek at the US census bureau and it seems to indicate much more young people than older. I suppose that shouldn't really be surprising.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Nope. A lot of people that identify as 'developer' move on to other roles such as team lead or architect or, if they're lucky, retire before they hit 40. There's also the bias of stack overflow's users, of course; I can imagine that experienced devs visit SO less and thus never saw the survery (I know I didn't, and I still occasionally visit it)
dagw 11y ago
Those numbers are for the average SO user, not the average developer. Developers who've been developing for 20 years before SO showed up on the scene are less likely to make SO part of their development routine and less likely to fill out surveys about current programming trends.
esmi 11y ago
That caught my eye as well so I googled past surveys to see how the results have shifted. What was more interesting to me is the 2016 distribution is very comparable to the 2013 distribution. But then again this survey hasn't been going on for that long. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16C6ZeNSvd-qIg45J9E-vx2YCsD8w5oZaSTUtJ-52e-w/edit#gid=1077300498 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16C6ZeNSvd-qIg45J9E-v...

hitekker 11y ago

> 10% of respondents self-identified as Ninjas. Real ninjas don’t tell you they’re ninjas. They just sneak up on you and slit your throat, which generally constitutes "hostile workplace environment." Ah, good wit. Very nice write up!

agentgt 11y ago
My company makes recruiting software so I talk and deal with many recruiters. I have to say I severely cringe every time a recruiter says "Rockstar" or "Ninja" (in a job description or ask if I am one). Just imagine using those terms for a talented medical doctor or lawyer. "Microservice" is quickly becoming another new recruiting term that I am beginning to despise. At least "agile" is mostly dead... mostly... Speaking of which what ever happened to "Scotty", "Rocket scientist" or "Macgyver" (those were the sexy euphemisms back when I started software dev). They were far more apropo.
- sciurus 11y ago
  Maybe we've just replaced "agile" with "devops".
  - SideburnsOfDoom 11y ago
    I have heard a candidate for a software engineer position talk with straight face about his current workplace's "devops team" and handing off software to them. So maybe it's getting that way.
    - jedberg 11y ago
      If this were reddit this is where I would post a "The force doesn't work that way!" memes. I can't stand it when people ask about a "devops team". That's not devops then! That just means your sysadmins can code too. Now, if they are asking about a devops software team, that's a different story.
      - 11y ago

Jommi 11y ago

What really hit me was the graph about valuing salary[1] On one hand it looks like there is a drastic difference: Developers in Finland and Sweden don't care about their salary! But looking at the Y axis reveals that the difference from the mean is about 15 percentfigures. On the other hand, even that is quite a lot. It also allows us to make sweeping statements like Finland's coders are undervalued (?) or that over half of the Developers in Finland or Sweden did not value Salary. cool cool! [1]https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#money-matters-more-in-some-countries https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#mon...

saosebastiao 11y ago

Just want to point out that the top 4 most loved languages are ML derived/dialects. And poorly utilized. When is the rest of the software world gonna catch up to this?

OJFord 11y ago

Interesting that: - JS ranks high in 'wanted' to develop - JS doesn't appear in 'love' developing - CoffeeScript ranks high in 'dread' to continue to develop Big discrepancy in appeal for people on the outside looking in compared to those using it!

ChrisDutrow 11y ago
Yeah, and a big endorsement for Rust - at the top of the "love" list.
onestone 11y ago
To be fair, JS appears in 'loved' as Node.js.
- sotojuan 11y ago
  Sounds right to me. I love writing backend, services, etc in Node but even with libraries I love like React there's a sigh coming out when I start working on a browser app.
- OJFord 11y ago
  Ah, I overlooked that. Though - without checking the original questions - that still suggests an element of "came for JS; stayed for Node".
  - onestone 11y ago
    Uncertain. There could be other JS-related technologies below the cut - React, Redux, etc.

santiagobasulto 11y ago

Fun fact. In Argentina the previous government used to give subsidies to McDonald's to keep the BigMac cheap, so these numbers around the world comparing salary to the BigMac index would look better.

shawkinaw 11y ago
This is not too surprising given their other statistical creativity [0]. [0] http://www.economist.com/node/21548242 http://www.economist.com/node/21548242
- santiagobasulto 11y ago
  INDEC is the government office in charge of carrying on the statistic (inflation, etc). They lied us for 4 years (with the previous government). They've shut it down completely 3 months ago (with the new government) and they're supposedly working to reopen it with legit information. We'll see.
bulatb 11y ago
Did you mean to comment in the fast food automation thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11304628 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11304628
- LoneWolf 11y ago
  I would say this is because the reference to the big mac index on the stack overflow post.
  - santiagobasulto 11y ago
    Yeah, exactly. "How many big macs can you buy with your salary".
hitekker 11y ago
A very fun fact indeed! Here are some sources to go with it: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_are_cheap_in_argentina.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_... http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-mac-attack/?_r=0 http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-...

hjalle 11y ago

Finding it a little suprising that C# is still decreasing in popularity, despite Microsofts recent efforts: 2013 - 44.7% 2014 - 37.6% 2015 - 31.6% 2016 - 30.9%

phhlho 11y ago
I wonder if it's actually decreasing in popularity or StackOverflow is just becoming increasingly popular with other languages. Looking at the number of responses to that question, there are lots more people taking the survey in the last two years! 2013 - 8042 2014 - 6537 2015 - 21982 2016 - 49397
dhogan 11y ago
Well. It didn't decrease as much. Perhaps it's just taking a moment to reverse the momentum.
icefox 11y ago
There is probably a correlation to the slow rise of the mac platform and the slow fall of the OS X platform. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-desktop-operating-system http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech... There are a ton of developers that will choose whatever language they have available and if developers are switching to mac they wont be reaching for C#. Then you have those that have moved on to F#. Objective-C has the same problem for those that have moved to swift. It is weird to think that next year perhaps 1/3 of SO developers will be on OS X. That is such a huge amount. And in the last decade Linux has absolutely won the server market. It is going to take some time for the clr on Linux project to stop the bleed from projects that moved off c# just to move off of Windows servers. Link to the full answers about tech from parent: http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#technology-most-popular-technologies http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#tech...
jinst8gmi 11y ago
Perhaps Microsoft's reasons for their "recent efforts" are becoming more obvious to you...

shawkinaw 11y ago

What I want to know is, how many pennies were in the piggy bank? My guess was 176.

benjaminhodgson 11y ago
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-survey-how-many-pennies-were-there http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-sur...
- shawkinaw 11y ago
  Damn, I was way off. Guess I badly misjudged my spherical pig radius.
gnrlbzik 11y ago
I totally forgot that they even asked that, even more I forgot what my educated guess was.... Shame on me.

rickhanlonii 11y ago

It's interesting to see that over 34.5% of developers surveyed use some flavor of a JetBrains IDE: Intellij - 17% PhpStorm - 7.4% PyCharm - 6.8% RubyMine - 1.7% WebStorm - 1.6% --- Total - 34.5% This makes the Intellij IDE the third most used environment surveyed. If you're not using a text editor, chances are you're using a JetBrains IDE. I'd be interested in seeing the text editor vs IDE breakdown (broken down by age and experience) once the full data is released.

zippergz 11y ago
Were people only allowed to pick one? If not, I'd assume the total is lower than that since some people probably use more than one of them.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Yeah. I've used multiple ones for years. Especially now that they have the license that gives you access to all of them, I prefer to use the language-specific one unless I'm doing a project that requires multiple languages.
  - manyxcxi 11y ago
    I've definitely noticed the language specific ones are a little nicer with automating some of those workflows that are very specific to the language. Like starting a new PHP project in PHP Storm vs IDEA
marklubi 11y ago
Don't forget about Android Studio at 13% http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-android-studio-faq/ http://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2013/05/intellij-idea-and-and...
arvinsim 11y ago
I have used Notepad++, Sublime, Vim, Spacemacs and the Jetbrains suite. If I want to do a large enough project, the Jetbrains suite really can't be beaten in terms of just getting things done IMO.

Illniyar 11y ago

From the looks of it Ruby has really lost it shine. It doesn't appear at all in the "most popular technologies, not even in back-end, and it lost 6% in "trending tech". It also doesn't appear in any other metrics. Is it really a trend or that SO's community is not representative of Ruby practitioners ?

razvanh 11y ago
I noticed the same. Maybe the results are skewed a little bit by the SO audience but I think it's a real trend.
waylandsmithers 11y ago
My personal impression was that Rails has matured and there aren't as many open problems at this point-- there are agreed upon patterns and gems for most things you want to do in creating a web app-- or at least a relevant SO answer that is the first thing that comes up when you google a problem or error message. I know that isn't exactly what this question was measuring but I'd expect engagement for Ruby in general to fall on SO. Compare that to the current wild wild west of JS frameworks where everyone seems to be doing their own thing.
ksec 11y ago
Well the SO community is definitely the representative of Web Developers community. And since Ruby is mostly Rails, and Rails is a web development stack, this tell a lot. And I think that is the biggest problem with the Ruby communities in general, NO one cares about Ruby is dying. Not Matz, not DHH.

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eranation 11y ago

Very happy to see Scala both in the "Loved" and also in the "top salaries in US", and same goes for Apache Spark. I made a bet on Scala more than 5 years ago and it finally starts to pay off... although the Scala job pool is only a fraction of the JS one.

hellofunk 11y ago
Here I thought it was referring to the Spark programming language.

whybroke 11y ago

Apparently the last 15 years of your working life you will be more rare than a woman programmer (3% vs 5.8%) It is absolutely fantastic the gender issue is being thought about at long last. But it is absolutely horrifying the ageism issue is not. Or worse, is as glibly explained away as past discrimination used to be.

kibwen 11y ago
It might also be partly explained by selection bias among SO's audience. At my first real job there was no other developer there below 40, and a few approaching retirement age (indeed, I was brought on to replace a developer who had retired). But I was the only one who used SO, and really the only one who turned to the internet for answers at all rather than reaching for the books on their shelves. (And also, our proportion of female developers was way, way higher than 5%.) Older developers are certainly out there, but they're woefully underrepresented in open source.

akavi 11y ago

Am I really that much of an outlier in loving coffeescript? I know a lot of people don't like the extra translation effort to debugging, and some aren't fond of significant whitespace, but I'm surprised that that's enough to make it into the top 5 most dreaded. Is there something else I'm missing?

robocaptain 11y ago
Right there with you. I was generally aware (mostly from HN) that it seemed less popular than when I started using it -- but _dread_? Surprising. I really enjoy it.
- josteink 11y ago
  I think dread is warranted. Seeing Coffescript is enough for me to completely disregard and abandon a project I otherwise perceived interesting.
  - robocaptain 11y ago
    Can I ask why? Just out of legitimate curiosity. I don't work with a lot of other developers.
    - josteink 11y ago
      I think it's ugly. It introduces uncertainty about the exact semantics of statements (as in does this code really do what I think it does?). It doesn't add any capabilities which JavaScript doesn't have. It makes debugging more complex, because errors are not actually happening in the code you wrote, but code a compiler wrote based on something else. It introduces indirection and complexity, while adding zero value. As such it's on overall a negative value proposition, and that's everything it takes for me to decide something is not worth it. I find it a perfectly rational decision and attitude. While I'm not a fan per se, at least other transpired languages like typescript and clojurescript at least adds new capabilities to justify the additional complexity.

vehementi 11y ago

If 10% identify as Ninja, and 17% of ninjas use windows phone, that seems to contradict this: > We received 59 responses from Windows Phone Mobile Developers (.1%).

hhandoko 11y ago
It's users vs developers. 1.7% of respondents are WP users (10% x 17%), and only 0.1% of respondents are WP developers.

vdaniuk 11y ago

Atom adoption among SO developers increased from 2% in 2015 to 12% in 2016. VS Code is at 7.2% and it's not even out of beta. Both Atom and VS Code are built on Electron so it seems that web tech for building code editors and IDEs is getting really popular.

dionidium 11y ago

"95% of developers identify as either a Developer, Programmer, Engineer, Senior Developer or Full-Stack Developer. Embedded Application Developers are most likely to identify as Engineers. Graphics Programmers are most likely to identify as Programmers. But Developer is the runaway choice here. It’s our top choice, too." Good. This has always been a very silly thing to have to argue about. The people who care a lot about this topic are saying more about themselves by caring so much than any of the above titles would say about what they do.

rfrey 11y ago

Half of all respondents have 5 years experience or less. That seems likely to colour a lot of the other responses.

jorgecurio 11y ago

hey guys I want to learn node.js, and react.js where's a good primer on learning these things along with javascript fundamentals?

jonesb6 11y ago

If 10% of developers on SO are students, and 2.5% graduate every year, does that mean every 10 years the population of developers increases by 25%? Do 25% of developers retire every 10 years?

kabouseng 11y ago
Well actually close. If you have 40 years of productive work in you (20 years to 60 then retirement), then yes every 10 years 25% of the workforce does retire. But I would guess that those 10% of students are heavily skewed to students in their final year of study. Second point is that not all undergraduate courses are 4 years, some are 3 years, so probably closer to 7.5% of students on SO graduate every year. Which might indicate that the software development field is growing in terms of people active in the field. *Then again software development is a young persons game, so "retirement" out of the industry might be higher since a lot of people will retire to other fields / management positions.

executesorder66 11y ago

> Worldwide, developers with Masters degrees have the highest average salary. Developers with industry certifications and PhDs are also paid more than most other developers. Stay in school, kids But in the graph masters was second to "mentorship program" Can someone give an example of one of these programs? Is this just another name for an internship?

bobisme 11y ago

I'm surprised average hours per week or per year wasn't on the list. This also just confirms how grossly underpaid I am.