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Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017

342 points by kenrick95 10y ago

aedron 10y ago
Most loved platform: ... iOS (62%) Android (61.6%) ... Most wanted platform: Android (20.6%) ... iOS (13.2%) Android and iOS neck-a-neck for currently used, but Android far ahead as future platform?
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markatkinson 10y ago
It is weird being a "desktop application" and mobile developer and knowing that 70% of developers do something that I am completely unfamiliar with. Web development to me feels like the Boneyard from the Lion King. This shadow land that I am too terrified to enter into, and I have no idea why I feel this way. It also bugs me like it might be a huge shortcoming at some point in my life that I have no grasp of it.
- deleted 10y ago
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- k__ 10y ago
  With me it's the other way around. I can do almost anything I need with Web tech. Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. I'm doing a native mobile project next month, and looking at the stuff a iOS dev needs to get going is horrible.
  - pluma 10y ago
    As a web dev these days I feel like we have it the easiest: If you want to do mobile, try making it a PWA. If it needs to be in the app store (which these days I often see portrayed as more of a necessary evil than something desirable) go hybrid. If hybrid is too slow, try React Native or NativeScript. All of these can build on your existing knowledge of web technologies. If you want a desktop app, you probably don't actually want a desktop app anyway, so just build a decent web app. If you need something that runs outside the browser, use Electron. Or React Windows if you only target the UWP. If you want to build something on the server-side, there's of course Node.js. If you want something more tightly integrated with the database try ArangoDB. Again, same language you already know. There are still niches where you need the raw performance of specialised programs written in other languages than JS, of course, but they are growing smaller. It's basic economics: if you can hire two full-stack JS devs instead of one iOS, Android, Windows and back-end dev each, you can cover the same technologies with half the salaries. This is especially true if the specialists end up doing mostly busy work because you don't actually need their specialised expertise all the time. Few companies can afford to have all these dedicated specialists on the team but they may still want to cover multiple markets (e.g. an app for desktop and Android). In this case going for the web is the obvious choice for the smaller budget. The alternative would be hiring multiple contractors or outsourcing the project to a company that has the resources to provide all of the needed specialists all the time.
    - k__ 10y ago
      Sure. There are many ways to leverage your Web knowledge, you don't have to start from zero. But it's still a chore to do mobile development. I want to build a iOS app, because 80% of the potential customers are iPhone users, but in the future I want to use as much of the code on Android. So its Hybrid or React-Native. So I thought, well Expo sounds nice, and gives me a Web like dev experience without the need to set up a Mac OS system. Then I checked if they support AirPlay and HealthKit and the answer was "detach". So now I'm back to "regular" React-Native and have to setup a Mac to get started. Well, at least it seems running a dev VM for Mac OS isn't big of a deal anymore :\
      - pluma 10y ago
        Oh, absolutely. For some reason Apple seems to have filled Microsoft's role as the big bad legacy bad guy with vendor lock-in. Is it even possible to run macOS in a VM on non-Apple hardware with a non-macOS host yet? Microsoft provides free VM images for every OS and browser version you might want to test against, Google provides the Android devkit that works cross-platform. But if you want to target macOS or iOS it seems you're still stuck buying Apple hardware for $$$ to do anything. And don't even get me started on the lackluster support for PWAs -- at least the fallback for those is a web app that still works in the browser (provided you have Apple hardware to test it on). EDIT: Also Microsoft has moved React Windows into its official GitHub org and advertises it as an official way to provide extensions to Office.
        k__ 10y ago
        Is it a problem, yes? I read a few blog-posts yesterday that explained how to get Mac OS Sierra running on VirtualBox on Windows. Well, it's only 16€, so I will try it next week. It seems like MS thinks their only way to win something in the "mobile war" is pushing PWAs. And maybe they're right. Most people use the iTunes or Play Stores. They need to get devs off these platforms and show them that their tools are the way to go if you don't want pay taxes to Apple or Google.
  - mbel 10y ago
    > Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. The funny thing is that looking from the opposite perspective I feel the same. The web development looks like going back to beginnings of programming and reinventing everything again in the browser. You know, like when you read about 'tree shaking' being cutting edge technology in JavaScript land, then look at definition to realize that it's just dead code elimination that has been done by linkers & compilers for ages.
    - k__ 10y ago
      You're right, these optimisations are missing and all the fancy autocomplete of the IDEs for typed languages that are used on the desktop are missing, too. I don't know, maybe it just seems better to me, because I'm doing Web for so long now. When I see desktop/mobile with Qt, Java or C#, I see huge IDEs, runtime environments and SDKs and with iOS even vendor lock-in, simulators and whatnot. When I see Web with JavaScript, I see tiny editors, browsers that are already installed on every machine and bring all the SDKs and runtime environments, fast iterations, a good package system and general simplicity.
- frogfuzion 10y ago
  As someone who has to work in both for work, I understand your sentiment. I much prefer your world. I think the difference is that in Desktop/Mobile, whatever crap has stuck to the wall for years - you must use because you don't have a choice. And usually this crap is fairly well documented because it is your only choice. In the Web World, there is a bunch of crap thrown at the wall (every day) and you have no idea what will stick and what will slide off each year. Maybe a poor metaphor, but just kind of how I feel on some days.
  - ryanmarsh 10y ago
    This is the best metaphor I've seen in a while. For example, NSDateFormatter is fugly but well documented[0] . Also, the MVC pattern in iOS is from macOS which is from Next (I hear). OTOH I'm building my first React + Redux app and the best practices and patterns are still emerging. I feel like next year most of what I just learned won't matter. [0]: http://nsdateformatter.com http://nsdateformatter.com
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  I made the switch a few years ago from working primarily on Desktop apps to primarily Web apps, and beforehand I had this exact feeling. In my experience, web apps are way, way easier than Desktop apps in almost every way, aside from maybe if you have to figure out scaling really big (which you probably don't most of the time). You can probably learn everything you really need to know about web apps to clear that spooky feeling just by working at a new job for a month or two. It's not a huge shortcoming at all in reality, because at the end of the day, software is software. You can write software, so you'll be fine and may already be better than people calling themselves "web developers." Also, I don't know if this applies to you, but in my case part of the reason I had this spooky feeling was because the people who I knew who called themselves "web developers" before I actually started doing "web development" were not very skilled, and were inclined to portray it as Magic to other people, so that they could they could feel the satisfaction of being a sort of Arcane Web Magician. Plus, it was magic to them, because they didn't really understand it. If you have people like this around you, I suggest you ignore them and, if you need support, find people who are able to explain details clearly to you without presenting it as magic, or at least point you towards resources that can. Once I was able to do that, it made a big difference in my confidence in my own abilities and helped me improve as a professional tremendously.
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aikorevs 10y ago
Just learned that: Most Popular Languages by Occupation For Sysadmin / DevOps no 1 is JavaScript For Data Scientist / Engineer no 1 is JavaScript
- darekkay 10y ago
  This is a little bit misleading. This was a multiple choice question, so it's understable that most people have used JavaScript in some way within their projects. This doesn't mean, that JavaScript ist the most used language in those categories by the time spent using it.
  - thefarseeker 10y ago
    That was my takeaway too. If you ever had to change a spelling error in the front-end of a devopsy-style tool, then chances are you wrote some javascript, and bam: top of the list.
- nol13 10y ago
  My instant takeaway: Does China have their own version of stack overflow or is it due to the firewall? That many more developers in India vs. China or is English just more commonly spoken in India?
  - TorKlingberg 10y ago
    English is much more widely spoke in India. It used to be a British colony, and English is an official language.
randomname2 10y ago
Surprisingly a full 2.6% of Stack Overflow visitors identify as non male/female, of which a 0.5% transgender. Both numbers much higher than those for the general population. It would be interesting to see more information about this, looking forward to the follow-up article: "We will publish additional analysis related to respondents’ gender identities in the coming weeks."
- pluma 10y ago
  Based on my experience both in developer communities and outside of them, I don't find that surprising. While it is evidently true that there are disproportionately more men in tech, it also seems to be true that there are more queer/trans/non-conforming people in tech. Also I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are actually higher: assuming the choices are exclusive, the way they are worded it's not clear how transgender is intended to be represented in the results. Not everyone who is transgender sees their "trans" status as a distinct gender identity (i.e. the emphasis in "trans-woman" or "trans-man" doesn't have to fall on the "trans" aspect). I think a clearer distinction would have been a separate question "my gender identity matches the gender I was assigned at birth" (instead of distinguishing between male, female and "trans") but that might have overcomplicated things.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Yes, most female developers I know are trans women.
- kbart 10y ago
  That doesn't necessarily correlates to real life identities. I never post personal information if given choice not to, that includes as many "other" as there is.
provemewrong 10y ago
Some observations. Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching yourself. Oracle usage only 16.5%, but I guess it makes sense considering the web developer proportion. CoffeeScript as the third most dreaded language, behind only two instances of Visual Basic. But reading the definition of "dreaded" in makes more sense. Sharepoint as the most dreaded platform, ha ha, no surprise there. Clojure as the top paying tech worldwide, wow. But missing entirely from the list in US, UK, Germany, France sections, so where are all the Clojure devs? In general that's... comforting, if only there were any Clojure shops in my country (okay, admittedly I've heard about one startup using it).
- skrebbel 10y ago
  > Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching yourself. The built-in help for eg Java, C# or Delphi is amazing. It starts with autocomplete, then a tooltip with a summary, and full details including examples are just an F1 away.
- collyw 10y ago
  Maybe that goes part of the way towards explaining the higher salaries. If all the jobs are in the US and jobs there usually pay more.
- oblio 10y ago
  > Oracle usage only 16.5%, but I guess it makes sense considering the web developer proportion. At the end of the day, Oracle is expensive. Web or not.
- tom_b 10y ago
  Re: Clojure - something seems off with Clojure not being in any of the sub-regions at all. I also noticed that Java is not in the world-wide list and yet is in all the sub-regions. Given that the JVM is such a big part of the Clojure ecosystem, I want to dig into the data once they make it available. I'm totally willing to believe that developers with Clojure skills are in a high-salary bucket, but I'm a little suspicious of what they are showing here. BTW, for some years I chased specific languages as the cause of the high earnings. I believe this is much less true than I originally assumed . . .
andy-wu 10y ago
We will publish additional analysis related to respondents’ disability status in the coming weeks. As a student with a severely limiting physical disability, I'm looking forward to this. I'm really interested to see what roles those in my position are in.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Would love to read about your experiences, if you are willing to share :)
12389234 10y ago
Javascript and Java reign supreme. No trendy wanky languages like the ones mentioned on here all the time will ever be up there. Companies just pretend they "use go" to attract the trendy people here, when in reality "use go" means "there was a project once that we used go for" and 99% of their code is javascript and java.
- thefarseeker 10y ago
  Not sure if trolling or... but fwiw at Stack Overflow's SRE team we use Go a _lot_. We just open-sourced our latest tool written in Go, DNSControl (https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/ https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/), and we have dozens of internal tools and software written in Go. Not to mention other open-source tools like Grafana, InfluxDB, or Cockroachdb. I agree with you that Java and JavaScript will reign supreme for years to come. Just pointing out that not all of us think that's a good thing, and there is plenty of variety out there, in the real world.
- tclancy 10y ago
  Sure, and the you from 15 years ago would have written that about VBScript vs Python/ Ruby/ Whatever.
SiVal 10y ago
I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%. Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on. The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs, while the answer to the question above is the inverse: fewer than 1/5 of devs use Macs. (Though multiple answers were allowed this still says that fewer than 1/5 use Macs.) So, I'm wondering: Are StackOverflow and US dev conf attendees significantly different groups? (Ex: SO hobbyists very different from conference pros?) Or do devs usually install Desktop Linux on Mac hardware, and I don't realize that half of the Macs laptops I see are running Linux? Or do people use PC desktop hardware for development but use Mac laptops for portable use (ex: attending a conference, but they would still qualify as Mac users)? Or are all of the non-US conferences solid walls of PC hardware with so few Macs that they overwhelm the Mac usage in the US? Or have things changed significantly in the past few years? (I haven't been to a dev conference for a while.) Or what? Presumably all of the above to some extent, but am I missing something big?
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- yulaow 10y ago
  Outside of US, very few people use macs compared to you. Here in euw even in a CS course, engineering class in a top university or hackathon in a big startup incubator I can see like 1 macbook every 30 standard notebooks. Reason is simple: they are very overpriced for ours salaries (and I am in a first world country, I think their costs are prohibitive in places like India/Cina/etc) and - personal reason - as a webdev I can basically do everything I need in a 250$ old t430 with fedora, so I can't justify to spend like 10 times more just for a shinier piece of hw which is not even easy to upgrade.
  - flurdy 10y ago
    As you say that depends on income. Based on location and whom you mix with. And perhaps some culture bias/patterns but that is my just guessing. Macs have dominated in the areas I have worked in for the past 6 years. I would say in the companies, hands-on meetups and conferences I been to in London and across Scandinavia: 75% use macbooks, then perhaps 15% dell xps with ubuntu and 10% mix of lenovo, MS surface etc. Though I think this split will change with the recoil of the new touch bar macs. (Again this is just from my smaller demographic of location and people.)
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flurdy 10y ago
Shows you effects of the echo chamber you are in, as I was very surprised that Scala was only at 3.6%, and beaten by Go at 4.3 and Swift at 6.5% in the programming language section. The self-selection of people I follow on Twitter, the meetups and conferences I attend, the choice of companies and colleagues I have worked with, etc, probably just reinforce my blinkered echo chamber. This is probably true for many Haskell, Rubyist, Go people and others as well. By heart, I would have guessed 20% Scala usage, but in my head, I do know of the floods of javascript misuse across the world, the legions of java developers in every country and location, having been one myself once. And I guess my current location of London which I feel use Scala more than most places and mixing a lot with startups does affect my expectations of what everyone else use elsewhere. [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-programming-languages http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-pr...]
- hamstercat 10y ago
  We all tend to know our circles, but ignore most of what is outside of it. Myself when I was a C# developer, could tell of many companies using .NET in my city, but couldn't tell you a single company using Java, even though there was a lot of them (probably more than companies using C#). If I had to guess the usage of newer languages like Rust, Go, etc., I'd probably underestimate it tremendously, just because I'm not part of that ecosystem (not looking at job postings, not participating in conferences, not knowing popular open-source frameworks).
- peterjlee 10y ago
  Visual Studio is the most used IDE and somehow I don't know a single person who uses Visual Studio. http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-most-popular-developer-environments-by-occupation http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-mo...
  - thirdsun 10y ago
    Not only that, but it seems to be most used IDE in the web development category. I had to make sure they didn't mean Visual Studio Code, which appeared a few positions further down though.
manaskarekar 10y ago
Most Loved Language: Rust Most Wanted Language: Python It's good to see these two languages win out these categories! Good things lie ahead (hopefully).
- atulatul 10y ago
  Wikipedia updated with 2017 results:Rust won first place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2016 and 2017. Love the site.
- thearn4 10y ago
  These two lists made a lot more sense to me than the "most popular technologies" category. Which I think should be worded "Most common languages for questions" or something along those lines. But like others have said, I need to double check that I'm not living in a bubble while the rest of the technical world openly and not-ironically loves javascript.
tannhaeuser 10y ago
The "Years of coding experience" statistics are interesting in a number of ways IMHO. Is there an interpretation why it doesn't go down linearly, but has up and down micro-cycles? Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity?
- pc86 10y ago
  > Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity? I would think so. If someone started a programming job right out of school (~22 years old), and is still programming today, that would be any developer who is ~43 or older. I would say at least 1/4-1/3 of my former and current colleagues would fall into that age bracket. Not all of them started programming out school but many of them did for sure.
mherrmann 10y ago
I wonder why age was not included?
zerr 10y ago
Glad to see desktop development is still kicking (28.9%) but remote jobs are very rare...
banterfoil 10y ago
Students' Expected Salaries was the most surprising section for me. As a US soon to be grad, those numbers seemed surprisingly low. Perhaps the numbers are a lot less outside the US? I don't even think I could find a dev position that pays $30,000.
- swarmerab 10y ago
  You do realize that there are developers in poor/developing countries, right? $500/month is considered a decent salary for junior devs where I'm from.
- oblio 10y ago
  In Western Europe a senior dev makes less than 100k. A regular dev makes about 60k. In Eastern Europe a regular dev makes about 30-40k.
- pc86 10y ago
  Where are you in the US? Cost of living plays a major role in salary pressure in both directions, especially on the lower rungs of the ladder. Adjusted for (not much, but measurable) inflation my first job paid $32k. Entry-level dev jobs in my area are in the $40-50k range depending on the technology and company.
aedron 10y ago
I think the survey makes a very fundamental mistake in chucking a lot (the majority) of developers under the umbrella 'web developer'. I know they also had subdivisions (frontend, backend, full stack), but in the entire survey they are represented as one category. Those are fundamentally different roles. Someone working exclusively on server-side applications has a totally different profile than someone working exclusively with web frontend. Concepts, technologies, tools, everything differs, and so probably does the personal profile of those developers.
ljw1001 10y ago
I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. Many of the ideas developed for Smalltalk are now commonplace, so I'm guessing that it's the careful integration of those ideas that makes it special. It is my favorite language, btw. :)
- m0sa 10y ago
  Probably because it (still) pays so well? [1] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-and-experience-by-language http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-a...
  - travmatt 10y ago
    I saw that too and wondered if it wasn't an artifact of history - when I think of smalltalk I think of peter norvig and people of his stature. Maybe the high smalltalk developer salary means it's probably used by older and very experienced developers.
- mbel 10y ago
  > I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. It probably is because of the minimal use (and I believe #1, Rust, is also there because it's still not that common). Their "loved" metric is number of people who are using a language and would not like to switch to a different one. I suppose that the only people who use it are people who love it so much that they can ignore issues caused by lack of popularity (small number of libraries and tools, problems with OS support, etc.).
sriram_iyengar 10y ago
Loved the gif question :)
flurdy 10y ago
43% prefer tabs? Get out! [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-or-spaces http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-or-...]
- serg_chernata 10y ago
  Tabs are far superior. :)
  - tannhaeuser 10y ago
    This is the correct answer. The bad developer is identified by the rhythmic noise of arrow keys.
    - mbel 10y ago
      How arrow keys are related to tab/space flamewar? Isn't everybody (whose job requires typing) using moving between words as the most basic mean of navigation? (w, M-f, Ctrl+arrow, etc.)
    - yosamino 10y ago
      ... because they aren't using an editor coughvimcough that correctly positions their cursor automatically or let's them jump to the beginning of a line with a single keystroke ?
- m0sa 10y ago
  The problematic ones are the 19.3% who prefer both...
  - kbart 10y ago
    I choose between tabs and spaces depending on existing code base, but prefer neither (or both). When writing code from scratch, it depends on language and text editor used.
  - parroquiano 10y ago
matt_s 10y ago
I think there is severe bias in their results simply because of the content in stack overflow and the people that visit. For example, the data on a lot of developers only having 1-3 years of programming experience. That would naturally follow that a majority of active users on a Q&A site would not have much experience, right? Same can be said for data about what technologies are represented - JavaScript was at the top of "Most Popular Technologies". There is a lot of churn in JS frameworks... which probably leads to a lot of questions for inexperienced programmers... which would visit the site more frequently. There definitely are some good results in there - I would just take anything regarding popularity with a grain of salt. I also suspect the population of people taking the survey don't fully represent all software developers equally. People that are in a stable role using "unpopular" or proprietary technology have no use for stack overflow.
- Kiro 10y ago
  I agree. Anecdotal but I used to visit SO all the time during my first years as a programmer compared to now where I only need it occasionally. It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    > It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question. This doesn't necessarily mean it's about your experience, that is, as more and more questions are asked and answered, it is more likely that an answer already exists, so you don't need to ask a new question.
eddd 10y ago
How is it possible that "When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers, 63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they’re full-time remote or almost all the time." And only a few percent of companies hires remote?
- wyldfire 10y ago
  The most likely explanation is that the distribution sampled doesn't match the distribution from which you drew "only a few percent of companies hires remote". But it's also possible that people have different opinions on what "almost all the time" means.
amelius 10y ago
Some things that stand out: - The "web" is not a platform? - France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe? - People who work for a small company usually have many roles, so asking people to pick their role in a single-choice way seems not right.
- hoschicz 10y ago
  > - France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe? Yes, France has higher taxation and politically leans left, even compared to Europe. That's weighted out by strong labor laws.
- hokkos 10y ago
  This doesn't account for taxation in France for 60K€ you would pay 10550€ (17.6 %) and in Germany 14000€ (23,21%), and there is also local taxations.
ihsw2 10y ago
Is gender and ethnic background of developers relevant?
- tclancy 10y ago
  Of course it is. Homogeneity is dangerous for an ecosystem and even if it weren't, not all apps, websites, products of code are consumed by straight white guys living on the US coasts. A mix of perspectives is a healthy thing.
  - justaman 10y ago
    I like to think that since white guys are generally the most universally hated group by other race\gender combo's, white guys just dont really care who you are as long as you get the job done. Thats why they have the lowest interest in diversity.
    - ihsw2 10y ago
      That's blatantly racist.
      - justaman 10y ago
        Its really not. Care to explain why?
    - strictnein 10y ago
      I think it's probably something else: To us white guys, diversity means us someone like us not getting a job, or possibly us not getting the job. All the other groups rated it much higher because it means someone in their group getting the job, including possibly themselves. It's an inherently selfish question, even thought it's not presented as such.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  Some people consider it to be. It's something people are at least curious about. There is a claim that "not enough X" go into software, where X is women or minorities or both, for various hypothesized reasons that seem very difficult to test for. One that's particularly interesting to me and at least has some semi-plausible story is that the way personal computers were marketed in the US ended up influencing the perception of the computer as something male, even though prior to 1980 women made up a larger share of working programmers than they do today. What I would find interesting from this survey is whether the gender breakdown between specializations changes when nationality is an additional factor. Because in my own limited experience, there are plenty of women who are competent developers, but I've only known one born in the US (n=8, but I work at a small company and this is is at least a double-digit percentage of the engineering staff)
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
> "We estimate that 16.8 million of these people are professional developers and university-level students." I wonder if it is relatively safe to infer from this that there are ~16.8 million developers in the world? Are there developers who never visit stackoverflow? I'd expect that number to be higher, even though 16.8M is a lot. Also if you take all "years since learning to code" up to "9-10", they add up to 50.6%, which means that the developer population doubles every ~10 years. Though I have heard elsewhere (I think it was a talk by "uncle Bob") that the developer population doubles every 5 years, not 10. Edit: Ha, interestingly his data was also based on stackoverflow: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html ...now does this mean the rate of growth is slowing?
- test1235 10y ago
  > Are there developers who never visit stackoverflow? Would non-English speakers visit?
- vmasto 10y ago
  Note that this data excludes the vast majority of Chinese software engineers (they represent just 0.4666% of the total survey responders)
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > which means that the developer population doubles every ~10 years Or that people stop being developers with time. Or older people use stack overflow less.
garganzol 10y ago
Survey has a particular flaw: it lists ".NET Core" technology, but it's a vaporware (e.g. not a real thing). It should be corrected to ".NET".
- deleted 10y ago
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- UK-AL 10y ago
  Why is not a real thing? I know people using it in production.
- ohitsdom 10y ago
  In what way is .NET Core "vaporware"? It's a very real thing that is documented and downloadable from here: https://www.microsoft.com/net/core https://www.microsoft.com/net/core
- garganzol 10y ago
  For those who cannot grasp the point: 1. .NET Core is on 4th year of development 2. Breaking changes from version to version 3. The absence of release culture. The approach of .NET Core team is to bodge together something with a scotch tape, then call it a release. Yep, they are even lazy enough to eliminate words like "beta" or "preview" in their "releases". 4. Astronautic APIs. They are so minimal to the point they are useless 5. Does not provide a reliable way of doing things. "You can attach any configuration provider you want"... Yeah, the truth is nobody wants any, everybody wants the one that works as a basic requirement. 6. Documentation is scarce and is totally useless. Yep, I know how that method is called, thank you. What I really need is the description of what it does, how it does it, and code samples. But what you get now is a large page of HTML per class full of some obvious statements like "Method void GetState() - Gets the state.". They call it documentation. I call it BS. I can continue. But the point is that this is enough to kill the thing off. .NET Core is already dead, but most people can't see it from the hyped bubble walls.
  - cholantesh 10y ago
    Much of this is debatable, and none of it adds up to the platform being dead, let alone 'vaporware'. It exists. It is in use. In production systems.
stephenr 10y ago
I can't find the actual questions, so if anyone can reference them it may help to understand the answers more. The "platform" part is at best ambiguous and at worst white noise. It covers mobile & desktop OS's, "cloud" providers - both IaaS like AWS/Azure & SaaS like Salesforce - hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, buzzwords like "Serverless" and mainframe. Apparently all of those things represent a "platform" that is in some way comparable, but Linux, BSD and Windows servers do not. The "most popular languages" shows Javascript as the most popular with Sysadmin/DevOps. I'm going to just assume the people answering subscript to the idea that "DevOps === Developers Doing Ops" (aka NoOps). I'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else.
- dagw 10y ago
  I'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else. I think that question was multiple choice. My guess is that most sysadmins use their favorite language and a bit of JavaScript when they have to, and since they all have different favorite languages javascript ends up 'winning'
  - stephenr 10y ago
    > most sysadmins use their favourite language and a bit of JavaScript I think more likely is that every nodejs developer considers themselves "devops".
ryandrake 10y ago
It would have been nice to see more of the long tail of Years Since Learning to Code and Years Coding Professionally. Wonder why they chose to not ask for the distribution after 20 years?
brilliantcode 10y ago
even north koreans uses stackoverflow!
raulk 10y ago
The "languages over time" section [1] is overrepresenting Javascript. It shows separate charts for JS and node.js, when the latter is not a language but a runtime environment. I would love to see the chart for Go instead of Javascript twice. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-languages-over-time http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-la...
perseusprime11 10y ago
I can't wait for somebody to send me a screenshot of the salaries and ask me why are we paying $150K when StackOverflow says we can find people for $58K.
erikb 10y ago
About the "ship it (optimize later)" point: The interpretation seems to completely opposite to the data. It seems most people seem to disagree with it. It's also most reasonable from experience. Everybody experience stuff that is supposed to be optimized later but then never gets revisited until it's rewritten completely 20 years later (again with the idea to just ship it of course).
dostoevsky 10y ago
Interesting how "Knowledge of algorithms and data structures" is the third most important thing developers think should be prioritized when recruiting (3.77/5), following communication skills and track record.
komali2 10y ago
Who's the elected officials that are using stack overflow? I really wish they had put more info up about that.
sebastianconcpt 10y ago
Smalltalk <3
johnlbevan2 10y ago
Suggestion: Add automated machine info collection to the Developer Survey A suggestion to improve the amount of data available in future surveys without adding to the manual collection effort, provide a facility to automatically collect workstation/environment info in a parsable format for consumption by the survey: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842
cholantesh 10y ago
People have discussed in the past that SO's user base is heavily biased towards web/mobile/database (including ETL) development. Are there any competitors to this survey that would be more holistic/diverse in its view of the industry?

342 points by kenrick95 10y ago

Most loved platform: ... iOS (62%) Android (61.6%) ... Most wanted platform: Android (20.6%) ... iOS (13.2%) Android and iOS neck-a-neck for currently used, but Android far ahead as future platform?

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markatkinson 10y ago

It is weird being a "desktop application" and mobile developer and knowing that 70% of developers do something that I am completely unfamiliar with. Web development to me feels like the Boneyard from the Lion King. This shadow land that I am too terrified to enter into, and I have no idea why I feel this way. It also bugs me like it might be a huge shortcoming at some point in my life that I have no grasp of it.

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k__ 10y ago
With me it's the other way around. I can do almost anything I need with Web tech. Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. I'm doing a native mobile project next month, and looking at the stuff a iOS dev needs to get going is horrible.
- pluma 10y ago
  As a web dev these days I feel like we have it the easiest: If you want to do mobile, try making it a PWA. If it needs to be in the app store (which these days I often see portrayed as more of a necessary evil than something desirable) go hybrid. If hybrid is too slow, try React Native or NativeScript. All of these can build on your existing knowledge of web technologies. If you want a desktop app, you probably don't actually want a desktop app anyway, so just build a decent web app. If you need something that runs outside the browser, use Electron. Or React Windows if you only target the UWP. If you want to build something on the server-side, there's of course Node.js. If you want something more tightly integrated with the database try ArangoDB. Again, same language you already know. There are still niches where you need the raw performance of specialised programs written in other languages than JS, of course, but they are growing smaller. It's basic economics: if you can hire two full-stack JS devs instead of one iOS, Android, Windows and back-end dev each, you can cover the same technologies with half the salaries. This is especially true if the specialists end up doing mostly busy work because you don't actually need their specialised expertise all the time. Few companies can afford to have all these dedicated specialists on the team but they may still want to cover multiple markets (e.g. an app for desktop and Android). In this case going for the web is the obvious choice for the smaller budget. The alternative would be hiring multiple contractors or outsourcing the project to a company that has the resources to provide all of the needed specialists all the time.
  - k__ 10y ago
    Sure. There are many ways to leverage your Web knowledge, you don't have to start from zero. But it's still a chore to do mobile development. I want to build a iOS app, because 80% of the potential customers are iPhone users, but in the future I want to use as much of the code on Android. So its Hybrid or React-Native. So I thought, well Expo sounds nice, and gives me a Web like dev experience without the need to set up a Mac OS system. Then I checked if they support AirPlay and HealthKit and the answer was "detach". So now I'm back to "regular" React-Native and have to setup a Mac to get started. Well, at least it seems running a dev VM for Mac OS isn't big of a deal anymore :\
    - pluma 10y ago
      Oh, absolutely. For some reason Apple seems to have filled Microsoft's role as the big bad legacy bad guy with vendor lock-in. Is it even possible to run macOS in a VM on non-Apple hardware with a non-macOS host yet? Microsoft provides free VM images for every OS and browser version you might want to test against, Google provides the Android devkit that works cross-platform. But if you want to target macOS or iOS it seems you're still stuck buying Apple hardware for $$$ to do anything. And don't even get me started on the lackluster support for PWAs -- at least the fallback for those is a web app that still works in the browser (provided you have Apple hardware to test it on). EDIT: Also Microsoft has moved React Windows into its official GitHub org and advertises it as an official way to provide extensions to Office.
      - k__ 10y ago
        Is it a problem, yes? I read a few blog-posts yesterday that explained how to get Mac OS Sierra running on VirtualBox on Windows. Well, it's only 16€, so I will try it next week. It seems like MS thinks their only way to win something in the "mobile war" is pushing PWAs. And maybe they're right. Most people use the iTunes or Play Stores. They need to get devs off these platforms and show them that their tools are the way to go if you don't want pay taxes to Apple or Google.
- mbel 10y ago
  > Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the last century. The funny thing is that looking from the opposite perspective I feel the same. The web development looks like going back to beginnings of programming and reinventing everything again in the browser. You know, like when you read about 'tree shaking' being cutting edge technology in JavaScript land, then look at definition to realize that it's just dead code elimination that has been done by linkers & compilers for ages.
  - k__ 10y ago
    You're right, these optimisations are missing and all the fancy autocomplete of the IDEs for typed languages that are used on the desktop are missing, too. I don't know, maybe it just seems better to me, because I'm doing Web for so long now. When I see desktop/mobile with Qt, Java or C#, I see huge IDEs, runtime environments and SDKs and with iOS even vendor lock-in, simulators and whatnot. When I see Web with JavaScript, I see tiny editors, browsers that are already installed on every machine and bring all the SDKs and runtime environments, fast iterations, a good package system and general simplicity.
frogfuzion 10y ago
As someone who has to work in both for work, I understand your sentiment. I much prefer your world. I think the difference is that in Desktop/Mobile, whatever crap has stuck to the wall for years - you must use because you don't have a choice. And usually this crap is fairly well documented because it is your only choice. In the Web World, there is a bunch of crap thrown at the wall (every day) and you have no idea what will stick and what will slide off each year. Maybe a poor metaphor, but just kind of how I feel on some days.
- ryanmarsh 10y ago
  This is the best metaphor I've seen in a while. For example, NSDateFormatter is fugly but well documented[0] . Also, the MVC pattern in iOS is from macOS which is from Next (I hear). OTOH I'm building my first React + Redux app and the best practices and patterns are still emerging. I feel like next year most of what I just learned won't matter. [0]: http://nsdateformatter.com http://nsdateformatter.com
thehardsphere 10y ago
I made the switch a few years ago from working primarily on Desktop apps to primarily Web apps, and beforehand I had this exact feeling. In my experience, web apps are way, way easier than Desktop apps in almost every way, aside from maybe if you have to figure out scaling really big (which you probably don't most of the time). You can probably learn everything you really need to know about web apps to clear that spooky feeling just by working at a new job for a month or two. It's not a huge shortcoming at all in reality, because at the end of the day, software is software. You can write software, so you'll be fine and may already be better than people calling themselves "web developers." Also, I don't know if this applies to you, but in my case part of the reason I had this spooky feeling was because the people who I knew who called themselves "web developers" before I actually started doing "web development" were not very skilled, and were inclined to portray it as Magic to other people, so that they could they could feel the satisfaction of being a sort of Arcane Web Magician. Plus, it was magic to them, because they didn't really understand it. If you have people like this around you, I suggest you ignore them and, if you need support, find people who are able to explain details clearly to you without presenting it as magic, or at least point you towards resources that can. Once I was able to do that, it made a big difference in my confidence in my own abilities and helped me improve as a professional tremendously.

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aikorevs 10y ago

Just learned that: Most Popular Languages by Occupation For Sysadmin / DevOps no 1 is JavaScript For Data Scientist / Engineer no 1 is JavaScript

darekkay 10y ago
This is a little bit misleading. This was a multiple choice question, so it's understable that most people have used JavaScript in some way within their projects. This doesn't mean, that JavaScript ist the most used language in those categories by the time spent using it.
- thefarseeker 10y ago
  That was my takeaway too. If you ever had to change a spelling error in the front-end of a devopsy-style tool, then chances are you wrote some javascript, and bam: top of the list.
nol13 10y ago
My instant takeaway: Does China have their own version of stack overflow or is it due to the firewall? That many more developers in India vs. China or is English just more commonly spoken in India?
- TorKlingberg 10y ago
  English is much more widely spoke in India. It used to be a British colony, and English is an official language.

randomname2 10y ago

Surprisingly a full 2.6% of Stack Overflow visitors identify as non male/female, of which a 0.5% transgender. Both numbers much higher than those for the general population. It would be interesting to see more information about this, looking forward to the follow-up article: "We will publish additional analysis related to respondents’ gender identities in the coming weeks."

pluma 10y ago
Based on my experience both in developer communities and outside of them, I don't find that surprising. While it is evidently true that there are disproportionately more men in tech, it also seems to be true that there are more queer/trans/non-conforming people in tech. Also I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are actually higher: assuming the choices are exclusive, the way they are worded it's not clear how transgender is intended to be represented in the results. Not everyone who is transgender sees their "trans" status as a distinct gender identity (i.e. the emphasis in "trans-woman" or "trans-man" doesn't have to fall on the "trans" aspect). I think a clearer distinction would have been a separate question "my gender identity matches the gender I was assigned at birth" (instead of distinguishing between male, female and "trans") but that might have overcomplicated things.
- k__ 10y ago
  Yes, most female developers I know are trans women.
kbart 10y ago
That doesn't necessarily correlates to real life identities. I never post personal information if given choice not to, that includes as many "other" as there is.

provemewrong 10y ago

Some observations. Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching yourself. Oracle usage only 16.5%, but I guess it makes sense considering the web developer proportion. CoffeeScript as the third most dreaded language, behind only two instances of Visual Basic. But reading the definition of "dreaded" in makes more sense. Sharepoint as the most dreaded platform, ha ha, no surprise there. Clojure as the top paying tech worldwide, wow. But missing entirely from the list in US, UK, Germany, France sections, so where are all the Clojure devs? In general that's... comforting, if only there were any Clojure shops in my country (okay, admittedly I've heard about one startup using it).

skrebbel 10y ago
> Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching yourself. The built-in help for eg Java, C# or Delphi is amazing. It starts with autocomplete, then a tooltip with a summary, and full details including examples are just an F1 away.
collyw 10y ago
Maybe that goes part of the way towards explaining the higher salaries. If all the jobs are in the US and jobs there usually pay more.
oblio 10y ago
> Oracle usage only 16.5%, but I guess it makes sense considering the web developer proportion. At the end of the day, Oracle is expensive. Web or not.
tom_b 10y ago
Re: Clojure - something seems off with Clojure not being in any of the sub-regions at all. I also noticed that Java is not in the world-wide list and yet is in all the sub-regions. Given that the JVM is such a big part of the Clojure ecosystem, I want to dig into the data once they make it available. I'm totally willing to believe that developers with Clojure skills are in a high-salary bucket, but I'm a little suspicious of what they are showing here. BTW, for some years I chased specific languages as the cause of the high earnings. I believe this is much less true than I originally assumed . . .

andy-wu 10y ago

We will publish additional analysis related to respondents’ disability status in the coming weeks. As a student with a severely limiting physical disability, I'm looking forward to this. I'm really interested to see what roles those in my position are in.

GuiA 10y ago
Would love to read about your experiences, if you are willing to share :)

12389234 10y ago

Javascript and Java reign supreme. No trendy wanky languages like the ones mentioned on here all the time will ever be up there. Companies just pretend they "use go" to attract the trendy people here, when in reality "use go" means "there was a project once that we used go for" and 99% of their code is javascript and java.

thefarseeker 10y ago
Not sure if trolling or... but fwiw at Stack Overflow's SRE team we use Go a _lot_. We just open-sourced our latest tool written in Go, DNSControl (https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/ https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/), and we have dozens of internal tools and software written in Go. Not to mention other open-source tools like Grafana, InfluxDB, or Cockroachdb. I agree with you that Java and JavaScript will reign supreme for years to come. Just pointing out that not all of us think that's a good thing, and there is plenty of variety out there, in the real world.
tclancy 10y ago
Sure, and the you from 15 years ago would have written that about VBScript vs Python/ Ruby/ Whatever.

SiVal 10y ago

I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%. Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on. The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs, while the answer to the question above is the inverse: fewer than 1/5 of devs use Macs. (Though multiple answers were allowed this still says that fewer than 1/5 use Macs.) So, I'm wondering: Are StackOverflow and US dev conf attendees significantly different groups? (Ex: SO hobbyists very different from conference pros?) Or do devs usually install Desktop Linux on Mac hardware, and I don't realize that half of the Macs laptops I see are running Linux? Or do people use PC desktop hardware for development but use Mac laptops for portable use (ex: attending a conference, but they would still qualify as Mac users)? Or are all of the non-US conferences solid walls of PC hardware with so few Macs that they overwhelm the Mac usage in the US? Or have things changed significantly in the past few years? (I haven't been to a dev conference for a while.) Or what? Presumably all of the above to some extent, but am I missing something big?

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yulaow 10y ago
Outside of US, very few people use macs compared to you. Here in euw even in a CS course, engineering class in a top university or hackathon in a big startup incubator I can see like 1 macbook every 30 standard notebooks. Reason is simple: they are very overpriced for ours salaries (and I am in a first world country, I think their costs are prohibitive in places like India/Cina/etc) and - personal reason - as a webdev I can basically do everything I need in a 250$ old t430 with fedora, so I can't justify to spend like 10 times more just for a shinier piece of hw which is not even easy to upgrade.
- flurdy 10y ago
  As you say that depends on income. Based on location and whom you mix with. And perhaps some culture bias/patterns but that is my just guessing. Macs have dominated in the areas I have worked in for the past 6 years. I would say in the companies, hands-on meetups and conferences I been to in London and across Scandinavia: 75% use macbooks, then perhaps 15% dell xps with ubuntu and 10% mix of lenovo, MS surface etc. Though I think this split will change with the recoil of the new touch bar macs. (Again this is just from my smaller demographic of location and people.)

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flurdy 10y ago

Shows you effects of the echo chamber you are in, as I was very surprised that Scala was only at 3.6%, and beaten by Go at 4.3 and Swift at 6.5% in the programming language section. The self-selection of people I follow on Twitter, the meetups and conferences I attend, the choice of companies and colleagues I have worked with, etc, probably just reinforce my blinkered echo chamber. This is probably true for many Haskell, Rubyist, Go people and others as well. By heart, I would have guessed 20% Scala usage, but in my head, I do know of the floods of javascript misuse across the world, the legions of java developers in every country and location, having been one myself once. And I guess my current location of London which I feel use Scala more than most places and mixing a lot with startups does affect my expectations of what everyone else use elsewhere. [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-programming-languages http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-pr...]

hamstercat 10y ago
We all tend to know our circles, but ignore most of what is outside of it. Myself when I was a C# developer, could tell of many companies using .NET in my city, but couldn't tell you a single company using Java, even though there was a lot of them (probably more than companies using C#). If I had to guess the usage of newer languages like Rust, Go, etc., I'd probably underestimate it tremendously, just because I'm not part of that ecosystem (not looking at job postings, not participating in conferences, not knowing popular open-source frameworks).
peterjlee 10y ago
Visual Studio is the most used IDE and somehow I don't know a single person who uses Visual Studio. http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-most-popular-developer-environments-by-occupation http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-mo...
- thirdsun 10y ago
  Not only that, but it seems to be most used IDE in the web development category. I had to make sure they didn't mean Visual Studio Code, which appeared a few positions further down though.

manaskarekar 10y ago

Most Loved Language: Rust Most Wanted Language: Python It's good to see these two languages win out these categories! Good things lie ahead (hopefully).

atulatul 10y ago
Wikipedia updated with 2017 results:Rust won first place for "most loved programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2016 and 2017. Love the site.
thearn4 10y ago
These two lists made a lot more sense to me than the "most popular technologies" category. Which I think should be worded "Most common languages for questions" or something along those lines. But like others have said, I need to double check that I'm not living in a bubble while the rest of the technical world openly and not-ironically loves javascript.

tannhaeuser 10y ago

The "Years of coding experience" statistics are interesting in a number of ways IMHO. Is there an interpretation why it doesn't go down linearly, but has up and down micro-cycles? Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity?

pc86 10y ago
> Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity? I would think so. If someone started a programming job right out of school (~22 years old), and is still programming today, that would be any developer who is ~43 or older. I would say at least 1/4-1/3 of my former and current colleagues would fall into that age bracket. Not all of them started programming out school but many of them did for sure.

mherrmann 10y ago

I wonder why age was not included?

zerr 10y ago

Glad to see desktop development is still kicking (28.9%) but remote jobs are very rare...

banterfoil 10y ago

Students' Expected Salaries was the most surprising section for me. As a US soon to be grad, those numbers seemed surprisingly low. Perhaps the numbers are a lot less outside the US? I don't even think I could find a dev position that pays $30,000.

swarmerab 10y ago
You do realize that there are developers in poor/developing countries, right? $500/month is considered a decent salary for junior devs where I'm from.
oblio 10y ago
In Western Europe a senior dev makes less than 100k. A regular dev makes about 60k. In Eastern Europe a regular dev makes about 30-40k.
pc86 10y ago
Where are you in the US? Cost of living plays a major role in salary pressure in both directions, especially on the lower rungs of the ladder. Adjusted for (not much, but measurable) inflation my first job paid $32k. Entry-level dev jobs in my area are in the $40-50k range depending on the technology and company.

aedron 10y ago

I think the survey makes a very fundamental mistake in chucking a lot (the majority) of developers under the umbrella 'web developer'. I know they also had subdivisions (frontend, backend, full stack), but in the entire survey they are represented as one category. Those are fundamentally different roles. Someone working exclusively on server-side applications has a totally different profile than someone working exclusively with web frontend. Concepts, technologies, tools, everything differs, and so probably does the personal profile of those developers.

ljw1001 10y ago

I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. Many of the ideas developed for Smalltalk are now commonplace, so I'm guessing that it's the careful integration of those ideas that makes it special. It is my favorite language, btw. :)

m0sa 10y ago
Probably because it (still) pays so well? [1] [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-and-experience-by-language http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-a...
- travmatt 10y ago
  I saw that too and wondered if it wasn't an artifact of history - when I think of smalltalk I think of peter norvig and people of his stature. Maybe the high smalltalk developer salary means it's probably used by older and very experienced developers.
mbel 10y ago
> I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. It probably is because of the minimal use (and I believe #1, Rust, is also there because it's still not that common). Their "loved" metric is number of people who are using a language and would not like to switch to a different one. I suppose that the only people who use it are people who love it so much that they can ignore issues caused by lack of popularity (small number of libraries and tools, problems with OS support, etc.).

sriram_iyengar 10y ago

Loved the gif question :)

flurdy 10y ago

43% prefer tabs? Get out! [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-or-spaces http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-or-...]

serg_chernata 10y ago
Tabs are far superior. :)
- tannhaeuser 10y ago
  This is the correct answer. The bad developer is identified by the rhythmic noise of arrow keys.
  - mbel 10y ago
    How arrow keys are related to tab/space flamewar? Isn't everybody (whose job requires typing) using moving between words as the most basic mean of navigation? (w, M-f, Ctrl+arrow, etc.)
  - yosamino 10y ago
    ... because they aren't using an editor coughvimcough that correctly positions their cursor automatically or let's them jump to the beginning of a line with a single keystroke ?
m0sa 10y ago
The problematic ones are the 19.3% who prefer both...
- kbart 10y ago
  I choose between tabs and spaces depending on existing code base, but prefer neither (or both). When writing code from scratch, it depends on language and text editor used.
- parroquiano 10y ago

matt_s 10y ago

I think there is severe bias in their results simply because of the content in stack overflow and the people that visit. For example, the data on a lot of developers only having 1-3 years of programming experience. That would naturally follow that a majority of active users on a Q&A site would not have much experience, right? Same can be said for data about what technologies are represented - JavaScript was at the top of "Most Popular Technologies". There is a lot of churn in JS frameworks... which probably leads to a lot of questions for inexperienced programmers... which would visit the site more frequently. There definitely are some good results in there - I would just take anything regarding popularity with a grain of salt. I also suspect the population of people taking the survey don't fully represent all software developers equally. People that are in a stable role using "unpopular" or proprietary technology have no use for stack overflow.

Kiro 10y ago
I agree. Anecdotal but I used to visit SO all the time during my first years as a programmer compared to now where I only need it occasionally. It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  > It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question. This doesn't necessarily mean it's about your experience, that is, as more and more questions are asked and answered, it is more likely that an answer already exists, so you don't need to ask a new question.

eddd 10y ago

How is it possible that "When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers, 63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they’re full-time remote or almost all the time." And only a few percent of companies hires remote?

wyldfire 10y ago
The most likely explanation is that the distribution sampled doesn't match the distribution from which you drew "only a few percent of companies hires remote". But it's also possible that people have different opinions on what "almost all the time" means.

amelius 10y ago

Some things that stand out: - The "web" is not a platform? - France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe? - People who work for a small company usually have many roles, so asking people to pick their role in a single-choice way seems not right.

hoschicz 10y ago
> - France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe? Yes, France has higher taxation and politically leans left, even compared to Europe. That's weighted out by strong labor laws.
hokkos 10y ago
This doesn't account for taxation in France for 60K€ you would pay 10550€ (17.6 %) and in Germany 14000€ (23,21%), and there is also local taxations.

ihsw2 10y ago

Is gender and ethnic background of developers relevant?

tclancy 10y ago
Of course it is. Homogeneity is dangerous for an ecosystem and even if it weren't, not all apps, websites, products of code are consumed by straight white guys living on the US coasts. A mix of perspectives is a healthy thing.
- justaman 10y ago
  I like to think that since white guys are generally the most universally hated group by other race\gender combo's, white guys just dont really care who you are as long as you get the job done. Thats why they have the lowest interest in diversity.
  - ihsw2 10y ago
    That's blatantly racist.
    - justaman 10y ago
      Its really not. Care to explain why?
  - strictnein 10y ago
    I think it's probably something else: To us white guys, diversity means us someone like us not getting a job, or possibly us not getting the job. All the other groups rated it much higher because it means someone in their group getting the job, including possibly themselves. It's an inherently selfish question, even thought it's not presented as such.
thehardsphere 10y ago
Some people consider it to be. It's something people are at least curious about. There is a claim that "not enough X" go into software, where X is women or minorities or both, for various hypothesized reasons that seem very difficult to test for. One that's particularly interesting to me and at least has some semi-plausible story is that the way personal computers were marketed in the US ended up influencing the perception of the computer as something male, even though prior to 1980 women made up a larger share of working programmers than they do today. What I would find interesting from this survey is whether the gender breakdown between specializations changes when nationality is an additional factor. Because in my own limited experience, there are plenty of women who are competent developers, but I've only known one born in the US (n=8, but I work at a small company and this is is at least a double-digit percentage of the engineering staff)

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

> "We estimate that 16.8 million of these people are professional developers and university-level students." I wonder if it is relatively safe to infer from this that there are ~16.8 million developers in the world? Are there developers who never visit stackoverflow? I'd expect that number to be higher, even though 16.8M is a lot. Also if you take all "years since learning to code" up to "9-10", they add up to 50.6%, which means that the developer population doubles every ~10 years. Though I have heard elsewhere (I think it was a talk by "uncle Bob") that the developer population doubles every 5 years, not 10. Edit: Ha, interestingly his data was also based on stackoverflow: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html ...now does this mean the rate of growth is slowing?

test1235 10y ago
> Are there developers who never visit stackoverflow? Would non-English speakers visit?
vmasto 10y ago
Note that this data excludes the vast majority of Chinese software engineers (they represent just 0.4666% of the total survey responders)
marcosdumay 10y ago
> which means that the developer population doubles every ~10 years Or that people stop being developers with time. Or older people use stack overflow less.

garganzol 10y ago

Survey has a particular flaw: it lists ".NET Core" technology, but it's a vaporware (e.g. not a real thing). It should be corrected to ".NET".

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
UK-AL 10y ago
Why is not a real thing? I know people using it in production.
ohitsdom 10y ago
In what way is .NET Core "vaporware"? It's a very real thing that is documented and downloadable from here: https://www.microsoft.com/net/core https://www.microsoft.com/net/core
garganzol 10y ago
For those who cannot grasp the point: 1. .NET Core is on 4th year of development 2. Breaking changes from version to version 3. The absence of release culture. The approach of .NET Core team is to bodge together something with a scotch tape, then call it a release. Yep, they are even lazy enough to eliminate words like "beta" or "preview" in their "releases". 4. Astronautic APIs. They are so minimal to the point they are useless 5. Does not provide a reliable way of doing things. "You can attach any configuration provider you want"... Yeah, the truth is nobody wants any, everybody wants the one that works as a basic requirement. 6. Documentation is scarce and is totally useless. Yep, I know how that method is called, thank you. What I really need is the description of what it does, how it does it, and code samples. But what you get now is a large page of HTML per class full of some obvious statements like "Method void GetState() - Gets the state.". They call it documentation. I call it BS. I can continue. But the point is that this is enough to kill the thing off. .NET Core is already dead, but most people can't see it from the hyped bubble walls.
- cholantesh 10y ago
  Much of this is debatable, and none of it adds up to the platform being dead, let alone 'vaporware'. It exists. It is in use. In production systems.

stephenr 10y ago

I can't find the actual questions, so if anyone can reference them it may help to understand the answers more. The "platform" part is at best ambiguous and at worst white noise. It covers mobile & desktop OS's, "cloud" providers - both IaaS like AWS/Azure & SaaS like Salesforce - hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, buzzwords like "Serverless" and mainframe. Apparently all of those things represent a "platform" that is in some way comparable, but Linux, BSD and Windows servers do not. The "most popular languages" shows Javascript as the most popular with Sysadmin/DevOps. I'm going to just assume the people answering subscript to the idea that "DevOps === Developers Doing Ops" (aka NoOps). I'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else.

dagw 10y ago
I'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else. I think that question was multiple choice. My guess is that most sysadmins use their favorite language and a bit of JavaScript when they have to, and since they all have different favorite languages javascript ends up 'winning'
- stephenr 10y ago
  > most sysadmins use their favourite language and a bit of JavaScript I think more likely is that every nodejs developer considers themselves "devops".

ryandrake 10y ago

It would have been nice to see more of the long tail of Years Since Learning to Code and Years Coding Professionally. Wonder why they chose to not ask for the distribution after 20 years?

brilliantcode 10y ago

even north koreans uses stackoverflow!

raulk 10y ago

The "languages over time" section [1] is overrepresenting Javascript. It shows separate charts for JS and node.js, when the latter is not a language but a runtime environment. I would love to see the chart for Go instead of Javascript twice. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-languages-over-time http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-la...

perseusprime11 10y ago

I can't wait for somebody to send me a screenshot of the salaries and ask me why are we paying $150K when StackOverflow says we can find people for $58K.

erikb 10y ago

About the "ship it (optimize later)" point: The interpretation seems to completely opposite to the data. It seems most people seem to disagree with it. It's also most reasonable from experience. Everybody experience stuff that is supposed to be optimized later but then never gets revisited until it's rewritten completely 20 years later (again with the idea to just ship it of course).

dostoevsky 10y ago

Interesting how "Knowledge of algorithms and data structures" is the third most important thing developers think should be prioritized when recruiting (3.77/5), following communication skills and track record.

komali2 10y ago

Who's the elected officials that are using stack overflow? I really wish they had put more info up about that.

sebastianconcpt 10y ago

Smalltalk <3

johnlbevan2 10y ago

Suggestion: Add automated machine info collection to the Developer Survey A suggestion to improve the amount of data available in future surveys without adding to the manual collection effort, provide a facility to automatically collect workstation/environment info in a parsable format for consumption by the survey: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842

cholantesh 10y ago

People have discussed in the past that SO's user base is heavily biased towards web/mobile/database (including ETL) development. Are there any competitors to this survey that would be more holistic/diverse in its view of the industry?