If I made it into two separate questions, I doubt I'd be able to make a meaningul report out of it with survey monkey. Plus, I don't think it's that confusing r

If I made it into two separate questions, I doubt I'd be able to make a meaningul report out of it with survey monkey. Plus, I don't think it's that confusing really - if you give your answer for a given field, it means that you're working in it. There is no academia (as in academic career track) - I am only asking about programmers, not researchers. If you work in academia as a programmer (say implement stuff at CERN), you can answer according to the nature of your job - ex. if you help scientists write simulations, you select "scientific/numeric", if you mainly work on massive data pipelines, you select "big data" etc. As for coming up with a list - I compiled it myself, trying to bundle together work that seems close enough in nature. For me, desktop programming looks similar to systems programming - i.e. it's mostly C++/C/other compiled languages, working against OS APIs, no garbage collection, expectation of reasonably low latency.