13 ms·

Developer Survey Results

372 points by juba08 9y ago

arkadiytehgraet 9y ago
I love the part about SO developer story: 84% either do not use it or have never even heard about it (which basically shows its failure) yet insights team tries to interpret it as 40% actually using it. Based only on this point, I wonder how extremely biased their conclusions are overall.
- pianoben 9y ago
  Quite a few of those stats seem suspect. For example, I personally find it hard to believe that "80% of professional developers" prize Javascript above all other languages. Seems unlikely based on my network (which of course is a representative sample of all developers).
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Not too unlikely. Cannot praise what you don't know and JS is the only language for quite a few developers.
  - knightofmars 9y ago
    Where did you get the prized by 80% from? I only see the "Most Popular Technologies" and it has JavaScript at 71% and it's not "prized": https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-... As far as it's popularity is concerned. It's not surprising the in least. If you have anything to do with web development you're going to have to use JavaScript. Making it "popular" out of necessity but not "prized".
    - pianoben 9y ago
      I'm using "prized" here as a synonym of "favored"; perhaps it's a bit archaic. I don't intend to alter or misconstrue the meaning of the survey result. Certainly, a front-end developer has a choice of compile-to-JS languages from which they can choose.
  - CSMastermind 9y ago
    20% of survey respondents said they're students currently. 50% of survey respondents have less than 5 years of experience. 30% of the respondents said they work on the front-end only. That will lead to some really weird results when viewed in aggergate.
  - babaganoosh89 9y ago
    ~50% of developers using standing desks is definitely not the norm either
- adumbledore 9y ago
  Were are you reading that? It's a long report but I wasn't able to find what you're referring to. Would be awesome if you could clarify!
  - WillKirkby 9y ago
    Ctrl+F "Developer Story" https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#community-sharing-what-youve-built-in-your-developer-story https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#community-sha...
  - Wh1zz 9y ago
    Towards the end. Ctrl+f developer story.
- pc86 9y ago
  Both you and SO are including the "it's out of date" category in your "side," that's why. Also their choice of wording is odd, I would have expected "Yes, but it's out of date." as opposed to "No, I have one but it's out of date."
  - Izkata 9y ago
    IIRC checking it out, even just out of curiosity and not filling anything in, automatically created a sparse one based on your Q&A activity. That could explain the wording.
jedberg 9y ago
With all the talk of Vim vs. Emacs, it surprises me that Emacs is in the low single digits, while Vim is 25% of all respondents. It does not surprise me that it is 40% (and #1) amongst sysadmin/devops practitioners.
- gordon_freeman 9y ago
  it pleasantly surprises me that VS Code is leader in pretty much all Dev categories. I love VS Code.
  - Rotareti 9y ago
    I personally don't consider vim as an editor, to me it's rather an editing engine, which can be used for Editors/IDEs. You can activate the vim engine in Emacs, VSCode, IntelliJ, etc. I think it's the most powerful text editing engine out there. VSCode does a pretty good job implementing the vim engine, IMHO. They integrate neovim directly [0]. The plugin has almost 2 million downloads, btw. I think the future of vim is not "vim the editor", I think it's "vim the engine". I guess this is also the reason why Vim is so much higher than Emacs in the stackoverflow survey. 0: https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/1735 https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/1735
- sdiepend 9y ago
  Isn't much of that talk "hyped"?
- blauditore 9y ago
  I guess it depends on how people interpreted the question. For example, Vim is the default editor for git commits on some installations, so maybe some people already counted that in, even though they don't use it for other editing purposes.
- midgetjones 9y ago
  It doesn't surprise me that much; I personally found it _way_ harder than Vim to get to grips with. Although I would have thought Spacemacs adoption might have pushed it up a little bit, as that was my entry point as a Vimmer.
watwut 9y ago
I don't believe that "Almost half of professional developers contribute to open source projects.", even if you count every single half baked unfinished project on Github as contributing to open source.
- andreime 9y ago
  Contributions include bug submissions and (were possible) comments in RFCs, right?
  - watwut 9y ago
    Yes, but even there the 50% seems too much. I can see people submit that much bugs in cutting edge communities (where there are still a lot of new bugs to submit), but when you work with something stable you rarely ever need to do so. There is huge amount of positions where people successfully use what exists. Plus, calling bug submissions as open source contribution is a stretch. You would not call "contributing to close source" when someone reports a bug to a company.
- drinchev 9y ago
  I have 3-4 public github repos ( <20 stars ) and I sometimes participate in definitely typed typescript moderation. I remember that I checked “participate in open source” on that question
- Klathmon 9y ago
  It's not half of developers, it's half of developers that answered their survey. I'd be willing to bet that people that answer surveys about this are generally more involved in other areas online like OSS.
computerphage 9y ago
Rust wins "Most loved" for the third year in row!
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  And yet corporates still don't use it and schools don't teach it. This shows how much power opinions have.
  - eitland 9y ago
    > This shows how much power management opinions have. Or how little power developer opinions have. Then again, -managing developers is like herding cats I heard so I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of small Rust projects hidden in the undergrowth.
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    It took decades for Python to be as popular as it should have been. Now it's got the point that it's overhyped. So maybe give it 20 years?
    - el_cid 9y ago
      overhyped? why?
      - cup-of-tea 9y ago
        It's got to the point that people think their grandma should be learning Python and it's a big buzzword in business at the moment.
  - steveklabnik 9y ago
    There are over 100 companies who are willing to put their logo on our website, and others we know about but can’t say, including Fortune 500 companies. Dropbox just went public and their project in Rust (and Go) was cited as a reason for their increased profitability. There have also been multiple university classes in Rust. It’s a start. (Also, this survey never claimed to be measuring either of those metrics...)
drinchev 9y ago
I’m actually surprised that around 64% of the developers are having a “Computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering” degree. I do my personal statistics for colleagues I’ve met and the percentage having no degree or degree in another field is around 7 out of 10. Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups and do my survey in the startup culture, but still it’s fascinating how much of those developers took the decision to become one at around high school age.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  This does not say only one degree. You might have a percentage that sums to more than 100% here. People tend to put in the most relevant one anyway when given the exclusive choice.
- blauditore 9y ago
  This probably depends largely on the area. Since you mention high school, I guess you're mostly referring to the US situation. From what I've seen in Europe, most (I'd say more than half) of the devs actually do have some degree in CS, or at did a corresponding apprenticeship. But still, I'd say the percentage of career changers is much higher than in most other fields.
- keithnz 9y ago
  having interviewed over the years in NZ, I'd say its around 90% with degree. But I've worked mainly in companies building quite technical products.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  > Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups startups are only a teeny weeny blip on the scale of "code" companies. Mastodonts such as IBM, Atos, CapGemini, Sopra and a few other are alone more than multiple hundred thousand employees.
- astura 9y ago
  Yeah, most people in the industry don't work for startups. You also have to consider this isn't an scientific survey, just a fun parlor game.
antirez 9y ago
Cool to see Redis to be in top position. For what is worth, Redis confessed to love developers, so it is definitely a reciprocal feeling. Btw surprised to see "contributing to OSS" at ~50%. Looks like an incredibly high number (cit. Trump), so would be awesome to see this question more fine grained next time. This may be an indirect measure of all the work that goes into OSS to make it sustainable. I would like to see: kind of contribution (Opening issues, PR, managing a project, ...) and average hours spent per week.
- koolba 9y ago
  > Cool to see Redis to be in top position. For those of us using it for many years now, it’s not surprising at all. Thanks antirez! > I would like to see: kind of contribution (Opening issues, PR, managing a project, ...) and average hours spent per week. StackOverflow could infer quite a bit of this by cross referencing the demographics from their survey results (assuming it’s not stored anonymized) with public profile information from GitHub. It wouldn’t reflect the whole picture but, for a lot of major projects that are hosted there, one could see the engagement vs usage ratios.
- megaman22 9y ago
  Technically, almost anybody that has a GitHub account could claim to be contributing to OSS. I've got a dozen or more projects that almost no one has ever looked at besides myself, but they are public, and they do have an MIT license slapped on top of them, so I could torture myself into claiming that they are open source projects.
- edanm 9y ago
  Definitely deserved for Redis, so thanks to you! And I completely agree about the OSS - this makes me really question the sampling bias of this whole survey, because there's no way so many developers contribute to OSS. Unless you really do mean something like "reporting issues", etc, in which case i'd still guess the real number was below 10%.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Maybe "have a GitHub repo gathering dust" already counts?
acchow 9y ago
Wow people actually use Ocaml at work?
- davedx 9y ago
  Yep! Facebook and Docker among them.
  - justincormack 9y ago
    Also Jane Street etc.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
blauditore 9y ago
I wonder why there's so much dread for Cordova. It's a framework you don't interact with often while using it, so I would assume devs would have neutral, unemotional stance towards it, but apparently not.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Because a lot of us web deva used it once for a contract before swearing it and all of mobile development off forever. I’m sure it’s come a long way since, but it was pretty brutal to understand and debug years ago.
  - dep_b 9y ago
    Because you're actually interacting with two completely different stacks at least that have a pretty leaky abstraction. So you only get the painful parts of iOS development, certificates and build chains not the fun parts. Repeat that for Android. points double barreled shotgun at chin As a native iOS dev I write my own wrappers for web applications, I think Cordova is too just too much hassle for what it really does and only limits my possibilities as a native developer hosting a web application.
    - mamcx 9y ago
      Off-topic: Any good point in how make the android webview to perform well?
- yesimahuman 9y ago
  Cordova is highly popular, and is used by web developers with limited native development background. Given that Cordova manages native projects, which is complicated and ever changing, it proves to be a complicated effort. Additionally, it has a large community of volunteers building plugins, but with inconsistent maintenance like any OSS volunteer effort. You're starting to see the same thing with other cross platform tools like React Native with managing upgrades and out of date plugins that rely on now-deprecated APIs. It's a hard problem if you're not willing to go in and learn how to manage each platform. Cordova is a victim of its own success when it comes to these surveys.
bruxis 9y ago
Quick question: How are ~14% of all respondents from India, but 4.1% categorized as Middle Eastern in the Race and Ethnicity breakdown? This is just one example of a strange anomaly in the data.
- def- 9y ago
  India is not in the Middle East.
- jfoucher 9y ago
  Not really replying to the point you're trying to make but I don't think "middle eastern" is a race nor ethnicity...
- seren 9y ago
  Middle East does not include India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East
- hdkrgr 9y ago
  I guess most will identify as 'South Asian'. Also you can see that the race/ethnicity question only has ~55k responses out of 100k respondents in general. To many of us it feels like a very US-specific question that we are glad to skip. Racial identity is just not part of our lives. I might identify as as European, but certainly not as 'White or of European descent'
  - SiempreViernes 9y ago
    Yeah, it is a bit weird to use US specific notions of race outside of the US itself. How many Europeans in Europe feel that of "European descent" is an accurate description?
wiz21c 9y ago
FTA : > Race and Ethnicity > Sexual Orientation Could we agree that : 1/ a coder is a coder, no matter his color, his sexual orientation, his whatever 2/ the notion of "race" is problematic at best And before I get down voted : who cares about a statistic about sexual orientation or ethnicity in a survey about IT ? I mean honestly.
- boffinism 9y ago
  > who cares about a statistic about sexual orientation or ethnicity in a survey about IT People trying to make the IT industry accessible to all regardless of sexual orientation or ethnicity, who want to check in on how we're doing at that?
  - dorgo 9y ago
    If you hire 50 random people (uniform distribution) the probability to get twice (or more than twice) as many employees of one sex as the other sex is about 3.5%. If you add ethnicity, age, sexual orientation etc. to the mix you will rarely get a random sample with all attributes proportional to their occurrence in population. Without quotas it will be really hard to be accessible to all regardless of [a long and ever expanding list of attributes].
    - wiz21c 9y ago
      Thanks for that answer !
- adgasf 9y ago
  Well if the numbers of various minorities are significantly lower in our industry than the overall average, then perhaps it indicates a hostile environment that we can work on.
  - dingo_bat 9y ago
    It can indicate a lot of things, don't know why you would reach that particular conclusion.
cup-of-tea 9y ago
I wonder how many are "web developers". They seem to have broken down that category into three or four possibly overlapping subsets. "Front-end developer" and "back-end developer" should be mutually exclusive because people in the intersection would be "full-stack developers". But if that were the case then more than 95% are web developers.
- frou_dh 9y ago
  Backend does not necessarily mean web technology. I'm reminded of an oft-lost distinction between "The (Inter)net" and "The Web".
  - cup-of-tea 9y ago
    I've not heard of other network services using the term "backend". Is writing a mail server "back end" development?
    - frou_dh 9y ago
      Yes. A rather uninspiring appraisal of cyberspace — web browsing & emailing — though.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Yeah, they did not even considered native development.
dcpl 9y ago
Just out of curiosity, why do so many people want to learn Go despite it not being used that much, 7.1% from the survey?
- roel_v 9y ago
  Who wants to learn Go apart from the people posting in Go threads here on HN? I have yet to meet anyone who is not in this micro-cosmos who's even heard of it.
- spondyl 9y ago
  Hype feeding hype? On a side note, I've been using it at work and I'm actually quite liking it myself
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Maybe because it is a Google language, if it was done at company XYZ no one would care. Also because anyone jumping into the Docker/Kubernetes train eventually has to deal with Go.
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  I started with Go out of shear curiosity a few years ago. Built a few web backends with it, and a number of simple utility tools with it. I know this is a bit of a broken record line, but it's standard library and simplicity have made it something I naturally gravitate towards. Especially when I need to do something quick.
- kej 9y ago
  If you come from a Python/Ruby/JavaScript background (which is a lot of people), Go is a language that is not much more complex but will run faster and be easier to distribute. I can see that being a big appeal, especially compared to something like Rust or C++ which is going to require a lot more learning to become productive.
boffinism 9y ago
Note the salary graph that shows if you've got over 10 years experience you can either be an engineering manager (small cog in a big machine) and make a ton of money, or a CTO (big cog in probably a much smaller machine) and make 20% less.
- zemo 9y ago
  the CTO/CEO point probably reflects that people who start their own company AND take the SO developer survey always call themselves CTO or CEO. People don't start their own company and call themselves a developer or an engineering manager. CTO ... of what? Most startups will die before they ever have an engineering manager.
  - pc86 9y ago
    C-suite is by definition close to the top but I wish more people would understand it also needs to be far from the bottom. You're not working on the types of things the C-suite works on unless you have a lot of people below you taking care of everything else.
- codingdave 9y ago
  That graph isn't showing years of experience vs. salary, it is showing average years of experience by role vs. salary. Most developers with more than 10 years experience are at the higher end (at least) of that graph, but those numbers just aren't what the graph represents.
- WhompingWindows 9y ago
  For average salaries, why does this survey not display the sample size and variance of these mean estimates? Also, I doubt that mean estimates are the best measure, rather than medians. I say that since salary data is probably multi-modally distributed with some very high earners and a largely left-skewed distribution with many low earners who do the grunt work / are less experienced.
d3ckard 9y ago
I was seriously surprised how popular VSCode has become. I know it's good, but for MS to win IT crowd that fast... kudos.
- gtsteve 9y ago
  It's a good text editor, and when I'm working with lots of Dockerfiles and Terraform configurations it's replaced Atom and Notepad++ as my go-to editor. The JavaScript editor's not half bad either. But for serious development, I don't think I'll be dropping Webstorm or Rider for it any time soon though.
- tpush 9y ago
  Visual Studio Code + the cquery extension is heaven for me coding in C/C++.
  - jhasse 9y ago
    Also checkout Clang-Format. It's so awesome to mark some unintended code and have it formatted instantly in your editor with a key press. All while editing the file via the Git diff view :)
vivan 9y ago
One nitpick here - they refer to Angular as AngularJS - these are actually two different things. I don't quite remember but did the survey itself distinguish between the two? If not then this will skew the numbers upwards.
- swyx 9y ago
  i rather they be combined. I know they are different but one is the successor of the other.
Zitrax 9y ago
Any idea why salaries for C/C++ developers seem to be way below average in these stats?
- bigcostooge 9y ago
  International responses skew the salary data and make it useless.
  - gota 9y ago
    This is true. It always feels weird answering these kinds of questions living outside of the US. You can easily have a salary that is several times the average of your country (I'm talking like 20x) and still make about half of what you'd make in the US, when shown in USD.
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    C++ is consistently less well paid than Java in the US and in the UK.
- coffeeaddicted 9y ago
  Least paid developer type is game development. And c++ is commonly used there.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  C/C++ are basically languages used only for technical products, while Java/web is used internally by pretty much every large company on Earth. This puts immense pressure on salaries.
matchilling 9y ago
Another #FunFact: Perl ranked number 5 in "What Languages Are Associated with the Highest Salaries Worldwide?" https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d...
- vgy7ujm 9y ago
  #1 in Perl programmer happiness also. (Not part of survey.) :)
fauigerzigerk 9y ago
The "Platforms" answers are hard to believe, or let's say it's hard for me to believe that they are remotely representative of the overall developer population. 18% claim to have done development work for macOS. That's more than for iOS, which is neck and neck with Raspberry Pi. What's going on here? Have web devs simply checked all platform boxes?
- conradfr 9y ago
  It's also really strange (to me) how no PHP frameworks or CMS made the cut.
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    WordPress is up there at 16%
    - conradfr 9y ago
      Ah yes, I was more thinking about the "Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools" section, my bad.
  - mikro2nd 9y ago
    Really, really peculiar to me was that no blockchain platforms were included. Would have been particularly interesting imho in relation to salaries and experience levels.
- pavlov 9y ago
  I guess many misunderstood the question and answered macOS because they use a Mac for development.
arvinsim 9y ago
Whhy is the salary for F# developers high?
- garganzol 9y ago
  I assume that F# developers bring better business outcomes. I am both a C# and F# developer, and in my experience functional code (F#, OCaml etc) tends to be 5 times less buggy than an imperative equivalent. F# compiler does an impressive job of catching errors at compile time: this is the primary reason for better outcomes. The second significant contributing factor: functional code tends to have less side effects, and thus developers can reason about such code more realistically. A third contributing factor is lazy computations. Which leads to (surprise, surprise) better overall performance at runtime. Less bugs + Better performance = Higher salary Though I don't say F# is perfect. It has its quirks and there is a lot of room for future improvements.
  - ageofwant 9y ago
    I'm led to believe F# is popular amongst the quants, quants work for the monied.
    - ozim 9y ago
      Agree so before jumping into learning F# keep in mind it does not go that way "Know F#" -> "high paid job". It is more probable that those guys were already in place where F# was useful so they started using it as best tool for the job. So they were already highly paid.
- pryelluw 9y ago
  There aren't that many of them. Companies using F# pay a premium.
- shaki-dora 9y ago
  I believe it has seen some significant adoption in finance.
- suprfnk 9y ago
conradfr 9y ago
Two unrelated remarks: I'm surprised that Elixir was the 6th most loved language last year and disappeared this time, while Erlang gained some points. Was it even in the survey? Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
  > Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist. How can you be labeled sexist if you point out a simple fact?
  - yAnonymous 9y ago
    See this thread, for example.
  - purple-again 9y ago
    You must be new to the internet. Hacker News has strong moderation so its one of the best asshole corner of the internet, but make no mistake, you are still in an asshole corner of the internet where you conform or are silenced.
  - atom-morgan 9y ago
    Ask Damore.
    - salvar 9y ago
      Yes, he clearly only pointed out facts and nothing else. This is a fair and honest assessment of what happened.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    You already know the answer to this. The context of your fact-based statement is where it's meaning (and any offence/labeling) is derived from, not the fact itself, and in this case the person you are responding to is adding an additional fact without citation: This is the "simple" fact: > Women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender" in a StackOverflow survey targeted at people (mostly developers) who use stackoverflow This is the additional fact that has been added: > [that fact is] a contributing factor for the pay gap And then the phrase > you can be labeled as sexist is added, which of course can be applied to anything anyone ever says about anything gender related. If you deliberately add unsubstantiated information to a fact you will probably be called out for it, and rightly so (IMO).
garganzol 9y ago
>.NET Core Thanks they hadn't put a Silverlight instead of .NET. StackOverlow makes this mistake third year in a row. It is not .NET Core, it is .NET. .NET Core is just yet another implementation of .NET runtime.
- james-skemp 9y ago
  As a .NET developer, there's a difference between saying .NET and .NET Core, however. You can be interested in .NET Core but not in .NET in general if you're looking for cross-platform applications, for example. Having used .NET for almost a decade, I think I selected .NET Core for a couple options since I hadn't been able to learn about the differences. And there's pretty significant differences, especially tooling support (like the inability to really do database-first as easily as you can with .NET). So, I think it's fine.
austincheney 9y ago
Coming from the web world I find the term "back end developer" a heavily abused term. Most developers of web products would consider themselves back-end developers and typically program in either Java (or one of its variants) or C#. This isn't back-end merely because it isn't in a browser. Your average web product Java developer is all middleware. They write code that gels between internal services and output to the user environment. At most large web companies real back-end teams are heavily isolated and don't let the middleware people come anywhere close to them even if they are all writing in the same language. If your web-product Java developer needs data they call to a service managed by an unrelated team.
xpavlic4 9y ago
I like how Scala is connected to Spark and Hadoop but nothing else...
Froyoh 9y ago
Was very surprised about the gender ratio: 92.7% Male, 6.8% Female, 0.9% Non-binary, 0.7% Transgender
- executesorder66 9y ago
  What were you expecting?
  - yAnonymous 9y ago
    Not a multiple choice answer, for one.
  - Froyoh 9y ago
    A lot more females?
    - executesorder66 9y ago
      Like 10% more or like 40% more females? I get that a lot of people want more diversity in Tech, but honestly it's just not something most girls are interested in. If you saw the following gender ratios for pre-shcool teachers: 92.7% Female, 6.8% Male, 0.9% Non-binary, 0.7% Transgender Would you be surprised? Would you think more men need help "getting into the industry" since they are underrepresented? Or would you think that most guys just don't want to do that for a job/career?
- culot 9y ago
  A non-binary coder? How does that even work? :P
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- branx 9y ago
  I was confused about this one - Transgender isn't a gender, it's a change of gender. Why would it be a selection? Wouldn't a trans person identify with M or F?
benkuhn 9y ago
It's a little disappointing to see so many developers--maybe on average the most comfortable job in the world right now--prioritizing comforts like compensation, using their favorite languages, or remote work, over helping to improve the world. Over 45% of men prioritized one of the above three, whereas a mere 6.5% prioritized "How widely used or impactful the product or service I'd be working on is." Revealingly, "How much impact I could have by working there" isn't even an option. Sounds like the survey authors didn't even consider that people might actively care about improving the world. So many developers have comfort to spare! Maybe spend a little bit more optimization power on trying to accomplish something important?
- s_dev 9y ago
  >prioritizing comforts like compensation, using their favorite languages, or remote work, over helping to improve the world. Compensation isn't a comfort -- it's more like payment which is necessary. Not really something a developer could forgo. Regarding languages -- why would they not want to leverage their knowledge to get more compensation?
  - calcifer 9y ago
    > Compensation isn't a comfort Sure it is. If you can "be fine" with $X, but are looking for a job that pays $Y (where $Y>$X), then that's seeking comfort.
    - crispyporkbites 9y ago
      $X directly relates to when I retire, so I see a high salary as buying time and freedom
- lozenge 9y ago
  How have you had an impact? I'm curious because when I looked, the impact I could have through my job (at the cost of 2,000 hours a year) seemed quite small, and the impact of donating high. I'm aware the topic has been covered in great detail, eg by the organization 80,000 hours. You are happy doing something because of its impact, but to expect everybody else to seems very presumptive. Edit: just noticed who you are ha ha
lucideer 9y ago
I quite enjoy the irony that Coffeescript—a language apparently invented to make Javascript more palatable—is the third most dreaded language in the survey.
- purple-again 9y ago
  Atom is written entirely in Javascript and I can edit it however I want??? Thats AWESOME! Wait its written in coffescript...fuck you. That's a replay of a real life experience that went down when I first heard of Atom.
  - andrewmcwatters 9y ago
    The more layers you add, the less inclusive it becomes. Coffeescript is decidedly a divisive technology.
- zmmmmm 9y ago
  I think the "dreaded" category is quite complex and hard to interpret. People can dread a language for a bunch different reasons that aren't necessarily related to the attributes of the language, or even how much it is intrinsically liked. One is a class of language where people run into it incidentally without having any deep experience, but are forced to interact with it, and find it very unpleasant. Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin, but also one of the most dreaded languages, I think because there's a large number of people whose only encounter with it ever is when there's something wrong with their Gradle script that they can't figure out. Coffeescript could be a similar kind of case.
  - vorg 9y ago
    > Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin Things have changed in the past few years. I would now put Apache Groovy in a different tier than those other two. Kotlin's rise has been at Groovy's (as well as Java's) expense. So nowadays I would rank JVM language adoption as these tiers: 1. Java 2. Kotlin, Scala 3. Clojure, Groovy 4. others, e.g. JRuby, Ceylon
pythonaut_16 9y ago
I'm surprised Vue doesn't show up on the list anywhere. From everything I've seen Vue should probably show up in either the loved or wanted categories.
- megaman22 9y ago
  I'm not sure anybody outside of HN readership knows about Vue at all. It's either Angular, old Angular, or React everywhere.
  - janneklouman 9y ago
    Don't you think that's a bit naïve? Take this anecdotal counterevidence for instance: none of the four people I work with visit HN but all know of Vue.
- forgot-my-pw 9y ago
  Maybe because the docs are good enough and easy to understand. I can't remember if I ever looked up things on SO for Vue.
pjmlp 9y ago
Nice to see C++ on the loved languages section, while C only deserved an entry on the dreaded ones above C++ and has half of the wanted percentage.
- jgh 9y ago
  Other than the verbosity the new versions of C++ are so much nicer to work with than C++03. C++17 is even better, constexpr if simplifying templates, structured bindings (though I wish there was an ignore option), optionals, if the C++ standards committee isn't careful they might end up with an enjoyable language in a decade or so.
adumbledore 9y ago
I am not sure about you, but as my career as a developer progressed I rely less on Stack Overflow today as I did in the past. To me it seems that this survey may have a strong bias.
ryandrake 9y ago
> Most developers feel that management is ultimately most accountable for unethical results of code. Just under 20% of respondents said that a developer who writes code used for unethical purposes is most responsible. This kind of surprised me. On the one hand, we complain about being considered code monkeys and mere "implementors," but on the other hand, if we're asked to code something unethical, well "we're just following orders." I personally think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our responsibility to no do harm. Ask doctors this survey question and see the wildly different results.
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>I personally think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our responsibility to no do harm. Not possible in most companies where your career depends being a yes man to the management. You would be surprised how often doing the right thing gets people fired. Of course you could say 'grow spine' or whatever. But you can't suffer for ever in a ecosystem where everything is stacked against you. At some point in putting food on the table takes precedence.
- lightbyte 9y ago
  I think that one result is a bit misleading. 79.6% said they consider the ethical implications of what they are asked to do. 82.3% said they would report ethical concerns in some form. 58.5% said they would refuse to write code they thought was not ethical (36.6% said they are unsure).
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Good point. I was also puzzled by that result, given the responses to the question I mentioned. The picture it paints is that software professionals feel their duty is to consider, complain, and (less so) refuse, but ultimately responsibility lies elsewhere.
- pascalxus 9y ago
  You should certainly report it to the appropriate managers. But, ultimately, ethics is highly subjective: and it's not your choice. You've sold your time to the company and have to produce the products it makes: even if you don't like their ads or product. You can say no, they can fire you and hire someone just like you and the product would still get made. Being a doctor or developer is entirely different. The doctor has much more freedom in deciding a course of action. As a developer you have very little power to decide what get's produced, because it's not your job function: that's what product managers are for.
ropans808 9y ago
What are people finding so dreadful about Redshift?
- scapecast 9y ago
  I think I can answer that, given we're in the business of Redshift performance. Redshift is incredibly powerful, but can be a pain to work with if you're a data engineer. To get the most out of it, you need to turn a lot of knobs - and knowing how to tune it is really complex. But if you get it right - it blows everything else out of the water. Including Snowflake and BigQuery. The key to success is using Redshift's Workload Management, and using best practices for your schema, table and query design. Many people who start using Redshift come from a mySQL world and are not familiar with a columnar storage db. Sort / dist keys are not concepts that people are necessarily familiar with.
erikb 9y ago
Do people not know that there is a database called Hana? Honestly before my time at SAP I also didn't know but I thought it's my personal failing.
dwhabcdefg 9y ago
As a queer female go programmer with over 15 years of programming experience, I did not realize how much of a statistical outlier I am. Neat. (I have trouble adopting the mantle of minority, as a well-paid middle-aged white person).
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- smoyer 9y ago
  As a straight male Kotlin wannabe with over 35 years of programming experience (with the first 20+ years paired with hardware development), I'm also going to refuse to be categorized (nothing wrong with Cobol but I like the new shiny things the youngin's are playing with). I think the most interesting facet of software (the cerebral creation of something out of nothing) is that there's a way for everyone to contribute in a way they find enjoyable.
- dmh2000 9y ago
  I just graduated to the elite 0.3% group, '65 or older'. Like you I like being an outlier.
dyeje 9y ago
What's up with Rails not being included in the Frameworks section when Django and Node.js are? According to Google Trends, Django and Rails have similar interest: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2Fm%2F06y_qx,%2Fm%2F0bbxf89 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2F...
- cpburns2009 9y ago
  That's weird. Also, can Node.js even be considered a framework? Isn't it just a run-time system?
  - jxub 9y ago
    This illustrates the confusion about JS in general.
- karimf 9y ago
  Yeah i guess they don't include Rails as an option? Like other comment said, the survey probably didn't include Elixir as well, even though Elixir got a nice rank last year. As a Rails developer, it's sad the number for Rails is far behind Django. This might make some confusion for people who are deciding which MVP framework to use.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
Remember that this data is representative of Stack Overflow's audience, not of the entire industry.
- gizmo385 9y ago
  I'd say that a pretty representative swath of the industry visits StackOverflow. What segment of the industry do you think is missing in this representation?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Different sectors of the industry use StackOverflow in varying amounts. Systems programmers on the whole probably use SO a lot less than JavaScript programmers, for example. More senior engineers use it less than more junior engineers. And so on.
  - astura 9y ago
    I've visited SO but I've never made an account, took a survey, or even know a survey existed.
- andrewmcwatters 9y ago
  yeah those incomes are telling
Dowwie 9y ago
Who Is Ultimately Most Responsible for Code That Accomplishes Something Unethical? 19.7% voted "the developer who wrote it" Do Developers Have an Obligation to Consider the Ethical Implications of Their Code? 79.6% voted "Yes"
- gemma 9y ago
  I initially bumped on this one too, but "obligation to consider" doesn't mean "obligation to quit their jobs over". You consider the ethical implications, you push back against management, management tells you sit down. Are you now obligated to quit? If you decide to keep your job, knowing that the code will be written either way, are you now ultimately responsible for it? (Completely unrelated but the first thing that came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0)
kej 9y ago
Results aside, I really dislike the presentation of different data sets in separate tabs. If I want to see the difference between all developers and professionals, or between genders, I have to click back and forth when it could have all been presented in one chart to begin with.
pascalxus 9y ago
There seem to be a lot more young developers than old developers. But, why? I can only assume that either, the number of developers is increasing (more and more young people entering the work force), or a lot of people stop being software engineers after 8 years. People usually work between the ages 22 and 65, so given a even distribution, if the industry isn't growing by leaps and bounds, the average work experience should eventually be about 20 years with an average age of 42.
- astura 9y ago
  Don't take this too seriously. It's a self selected group of people. Most professional developers didn't take the survey and it's didn't corrected for any variables.
- mywittyname 9y ago
  Growth of technology and an increase in job openings. Plus, a bit of cultural shift too. I think a lot of older developers grew up during a time when spending a lot of time using technology was considered weird. While today, not using technology all the time is what is weird. Also, software developers are much more highly regarded by young people now than ever before. There's this image of the young, rich entrepreneur creating products that everyone loves, and people want to be this. So a lot more smart people get into the industry because it's the cool place to be, hence the rise of "brogrammers."
- SamuelAdams 9y ago
  It could also be that more experienced developers don’t have time to take surveys.
- heedlessly2 9y ago
  there's a lot of students. Students and younger devs need to ask more questions, so they have a more active presence. While an older dev may still need to ask questions, they can just google, and find the answer without needing to create an account.
mherrmann 9y ago
I think it's interesting how VS Code jumped from 5th place among web developers in 2017 [1] to first place [2]. This made Sublime Text lose a place, putting it in third. If I were ST's Jon Skinner, I would not be happy about having M$ as a (free!) competitor. [1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-popular-developer-environments-by-occupation https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo... [2]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-most-popular-development-environments https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-m...
pascalxus 9y ago
It looks like most people stay at a job for just a year or 2. But, it would have been interesting to see a question as to why they left: were they forced out due to something the company did, or did they leave of their own accord for a higher salary (that was top ranked for how they assess a job)?
dmh2000 9y ago
In the section "Valuing Compensation and Benefits by Geography", I was surprised that Germany (13.7%) and Canada (9.7%) showed similar results to the USA (11.5%) on the relative value of health insurance as part of compensation. I thought they had that covered.
royalghost 9y ago
Good!
zbentley 9y ago
The "Why Do Developers Participate in Hackathons?" question is missing an answer option that I suspect is distressingly common: employer-mandated hackathon participation. Multiple places I've worked, and many places I've heard about from my peers, require employees to participate (either as a "this is just mandatory" requirement or as a "this influences a milestone on your performance review" requirement) in company-sponsored or external hackathons. This trend is somewhat distressing and deserves to be highlighted, I think.

372 points by juba08 9y ago

I love the part about SO developer story: 84% either do not use it or have never even heard about it (which basically shows its failure) yet insights team tries to interpret it as 40% actually using it. Based only on this point, I wonder how extremely biased their conclusions are overall.

pianoben 9y ago
Quite a few of those stats seem suspect. For example, I personally find it hard to believe that "80% of professional developers" prize Javascript above all other languages. Seems unlikely based on my network (which of course is a representative sample of all developers).
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Not too unlikely. Cannot praise what you don't know and JS is the only language for quite a few developers.
- knightofmars 9y ago
  Where did you get the prized by 80% from? I only see the "Most Popular Technologies" and it has JavaScript at 71% and it's not "prized": https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-... As far as it's popularity is concerned. It's not surprising the in least. If you have anything to do with web development you're going to have to use JavaScript. Making it "popular" out of necessity but not "prized".
  - pianoben 9y ago
    I'm using "prized" here as a synonym of "favored"; perhaps it's a bit archaic. I don't intend to alter or misconstrue the meaning of the survey result. Certainly, a front-end developer has a choice of compile-to-JS languages from which they can choose.
- CSMastermind 9y ago
  20% of survey respondents said they're students currently. 50% of survey respondents have less than 5 years of experience. 30% of the respondents said they work on the front-end only. That will lead to some really weird results when viewed in aggergate.
- babaganoosh89 9y ago
  ~50% of developers using standing desks is definitely not the norm either
adumbledore 9y ago
Were are you reading that? It's a long report but I wasn't able to find what you're referring to. Would be awesome if you could clarify!
- WillKirkby 9y ago
  Ctrl+F "Developer Story" https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#community-sharing-what-youve-built-in-your-developer-story https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#community-sha...
- Wh1zz 9y ago
  Towards the end. Ctrl+f developer story.
pc86 9y ago
Both you and SO are including the "it's out of date" category in your "side," that's why. Also their choice of wording is odd, I would have expected "Yes, but it's out of date." as opposed to "No, I have one but it's out of date."
- Izkata 9y ago
  IIRC checking it out, even just out of curiosity and not filling anything in, automatically created a sparse one based on your Q&A activity. That could explain the wording.

jedberg 9y ago

With all the talk of Vim vs. Emacs, it surprises me that Emacs is in the low single digits, while Vim is 25% of all respondents. It does not surprise me that it is 40% (and #1) amongst sysadmin/devops practitioners.

gordon_freeman 9y ago
it pleasantly surprises me that VS Code is leader in pretty much all Dev categories. I love VS Code.
- Rotareti 9y ago
  I personally don't consider vim as an editor, to me it's rather an editing engine, which can be used for Editors/IDEs. You can activate the vim engine in Emacs, VSCode, IntelliJ, etc. I think it's the most powerful text editing engine out there. VSCode does a pretty good job implementing the vim engine, IMHO. They integrate neovim directly [0]. The plugin has almost 2 million downloads, btw. I think the future of vim is not "vim the editor", I think it's "vim the engine". I guess this is also the reason why Vim is so much higher than Emacs in the stackoverflow survey. 0: https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/1735 https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/1735
sdiepend 9y ago
Isn't much of that talk "hyped"?
blauditore 9y ago
I guess it depends on how people interpreted the question. For example, Vim is the default editor for git commits on some installations, so maybe some people already counted that in, even though they don't use it for other editing purposes.
midgetjones 9y ago
It doesn't surprise me that much; I personally found it _way_ harder than Vim to get to grips with. Although I would have thought Spacemacs adoption might have pushed it up a little bit, as that was my entry point as a Vimmer.

watwut 9y ago

I don't believe that "Almost half of professional developers contribute to open source projects.", even if you count every single half baked unfinished project on Github as contributing to open source.

andreime 9y ago
Contributions include bug submissions and (were possible) comments in RFCs, right?
- watwut 9y ago
  Yes, but even there the 50% seems too much. I can see people submit that much bugs in cutting edge communities (where there are still a lot of new bugs to submit), but when you work with something stable you rarely ever need to do so. There is huge amount of positions where people successfully use what exists. Plus, calling bug submissions as open source contribution is a stretch. You would not call "contributing to close source" when someone reports a bug to a company.
drinchev 9y ago
I have 3-4 public github repos ( <20 stars ) and I sometimes participate in definitely typed typescript moderation. I remember that I checked “participate in open source” on that question
Klathmon 9y ago
It's not half of developers, it's half of developers that answered their survey. I'd be willing to bet that people that answer surveys about this are generally more involved in other areas online like OSS.

computerphage 9y ago

Rust wins "Most loved" for the third year in row!

AstralStorm 9y ago
And yet corporates still don't use it and schools don't teach it. This shows how much power opinions have.
- eitland 9y ago
  > This shows how much power management opinions have. Or how little power developer opinions have. Then again, -managing developers is like herding cats I heard so I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of small Rust projects hidden in the undergrowth.
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  It took decades for Python to be as popular as it should have been. Now it's got the point that it's overhyped. So maybe give it 20 years?
  - el_cid 9y ago
    overhyped? why?
    - cup-of-tea 9y ago
      It's got to the point that people think their grandma should be learning Python and it's a big buzzword in business at the moment.
- steveklabnik 9y ago
  There are over 100 companies who are willing to put their logo on our website, and others we know about but can’t say, including Fortune 500 companies. Dropbox just went public and their project in Rust (and Go) was cited as a reason for their increased profitability. There have also been multiple university classes in Rust. It’s a start. (Also, this survey never claimed to be measuring either of those metrics...)

drinchev 9y ago

I’m actually surprised that around 64% of the developers are having a “Computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering” degree. I do my personal statistics for colleagues I’ve met and the percentage having no degree or degree in another field is around 7 out of 10. Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups and do my survey in the startup culture, but still it’s fascinating how much of those developers took the decision to become one at around high school age.

AstralStorm 9y ago
This does not say only one degree. You might have a percentage that sums to more than 100% here. People tend to put in the most relevant one anyway when given the exclusive choice.
blauditore 9y ago
This probably depends largely on the area. Since you mention high school, I guess you're mostly referring to the US situation. From what I've seen in Europe, most (I'd say more than half) of the devs actually do have some degree in CS, or at did a corresponding apprenticeship. But still, I'd say the percentage of career changers is much higher than in most other fields.
keithnz 9y ago
having interviewed over the years in NZ, I'd say its around 90% with degree. But I've worked mainly in companies building quite technical products.
jcelerier 9y ago
> Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups startups are only a teeny weeny blip on the scale of "code" companies. Mastodonts such as IBM, Atos, CapGemini, Sopra and a few other are alone more than multiple hundred thousand employees.
astura 9y ago
Yeah, most people in the industry don't work for startups. You also have to consider this isn't an scientific survey, just a fun parlor game.

antirez 9y ago

Cool to see Redis to be in top position. For what is worth, Redis confessed to love developers, so it is definitely a reciprocal feeling. Btw surprised to see "contributing to OSS" at ~50%. Looks like an incredibly high number (cit. Trump), so would be awesome to see this question more fine grained next time. This may be an indirect measure of all the work that goes into OSS to make it sustainable. I would like to see: kind of contribution (Opening issues, PR, managing a project, ...) and average hours spent per week.

koolba 9y ago
> Cool to see Redis to be in top position. For those of us using it for many years now, it’s not surprising at all. Thanks antirez! > I would like to see: kind of contribution (Opening issues, PR, managing a project, ...) and average hours spent per week. StackOverflow could infer quite a bit of this by cross referencing the demographics from their survey results (assuming it’s not stored anonymized) with public profile information from GitHub. It wouldn’t reflect the whole picture but, for a lot of major projects that are hosted there, one could see the engagement vs usage ratios.
megaman22 9y ago
Technically, almost anybody that has a GitHub account could claim to be contributing to OSS. I've got a dozen or more projects that almost no one has ever looked at besides myself, but they are public, and they do have an MIT license slapped on top of them, so I could torture myself into claiming that they are open source projects.
edanm 9y ago
Definitely deserved for Redis, so thanks to you! And I completely agree about the OSS - this makes me really question the sampling bias of this whole survey, because there's no way so many developers contribute to OSS. Unless you really do mean something like "reporting issues", etc, in which case i'd still guess the real number was below 10%.
- dep_b 9y ago
  Maybe "have a GitHub repo gathering dust" already counts?

acchow 9y ago

Wow people actually use Ocaml at work?

davedx 9y ago
Yep! Facebook and Docker among them.
- justincormack 9y ago
  Also Jane Street etc.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

blauditore 9y ago

I wonder why there's so much dread for Cordova. It's a framework you don't interact with often while using it, so I would assume devs would have neutral, unemotional stance towards it, but apparently not.

3pt14159 9y ago
Because a lot of us web deva used it once for a contract before swearing it and all of mobile development off forever. I’m sure it’s come a long way since, but it was pretty brutal to understand and debug years ago.
- dep_b 9y ago
  Because you're actually interacting with two completely different stacks at least that have a pretty leaky abstraction. So you only get the painful parts of iOS development, certificates and build chains not the fun parts. Repeat that for Android. points double barreled shotgun at chin As a native iOS dev I write my own wrappers for web applications, I think Cordova is too just too much hassle for what it really does and only limits my possibilities as a native developer hosting a web application.
  - mamcx 9y ago
    Off-topic: Any good point in how make the android webview to perform well?
yesimahuman 9y ago
Cordova is highly popular, and is used by web developers with limited native development background. Given that Cordova manages native projects, which is complicated and ever changing, it proves to be a complicated effort. Additionally, it has a large community of volunteers building plugins, but with inconsistent maintenance like any OSS volunteer effort. You're starting to see the same thing with other cross platform tools like React Native with managing upgrades and out of date plugins that rely on now-deprecated APIs. It's a hard problem if you're not willing to go in and learn how to manage each platform. Cordova is a victim of its own success when it comes to these surveys.

bruxis 9y ago

Quick question: How are ~14% of all respondents from India, but 4.1% categorized as Middle Eastern in the Race and Ethnicity breakdown? This is just one example of a strange anomaly in the data.

def- 9y ago
India is not in the Middle East.
jfoucher 9y ago
Not really replying to the point you're trying to make but I don't think "middle eastern" is a race nor ethnicity...
seren 9y ago
Middle East does not include India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East
hdkrgr 9y ago
I guess most will identify as 'South Asian'. Also you can see that the race/ethnicity question only has ~55k responses out of 100k respondents in general. To many of us it feels like a very US-specific question that we are glad to skip. Racial identity is just not part of our lives. I might identify as as European, but certainly not as 'White or of European descent'
- SiempreViernes 9y ago
  Yeah, it is a bit weird to use US specific notions of race outside of the US itself. How many Europeans in Europe feel that of "European descent" is an accurate description?

wiz21c 9y ago

FTA : > Race and Ethnicity > Sexual Orientation Could we agree that : 1/ a coder is a coder, no matter his color, his sexual orientation, his whatever 2/ the notion of "race" is problematic at best And before I get down voted : who cares about a statistic about sexual orientation or ethnicity in a survey about IT ? I mean honestly.

boffinism 9y ago
> who cares about a statistic about sexual orientation or ethnicity in a survey about IT People trying to make the IT industry accessible to all regardless of sexual orientation or ethnicity, who want to check in on how we're doing at that?
- dorgo 9y ago
  If you hire 50 random people (uniform distribution) the probability to get twice (or more than twice) as many employees of one sex as the other sex is about 3.5%. If you add ethnicity, age, sexual orientation etc. to the mix you will rarely get a random sample with all attributes proportional to their occurrence in population. Without quotas it will be really hard to be accessible to all regardless of [a long and ever expanding list of attributes].
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    Thanks for that answer !
adgasf 9y ago
Well if the numbers of various minorities are significantly lower in our industry than the overall average, then perhaps it indicates a hostile environment that we can work on.
- dingo_bat 9y ago
  It can indicate a lot of things, don't know why you would reach that particular conclusion.

cup-of-tea 9y ago

I wonder how many are "web developers". They seem to have broken down that category into three or four possibly overlapping subsets. "Front-end developer" and "back-end developer" should be mutually exclusive because people in the intersection would be "full-stack developers". But if that were the case then more than 95% are web developers.

frou_dh 9y ago
Backend does not necessarily mean web technology. I'm reminded of an oft-lost distinction between "The (Inter)net" and "The Web".
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  I've not heard of other network services using the term "backend". Is writing a mail server "back end" development?
  - frou_dh 9y ago
    Yes. A rather uninspiring appraisal of cyberspace — web browsing & emailing — though.
pjmlp 9y ago
Yeah, they did not even considered native development.

dcpl 9y ago

Just out of curiosity, why do so many people want to learn Go despite it not being used that much, 7.1% from the survey?

roel_v 9y ago
Who wants to learn Go apart from the people posting in Go threads here on HN? I have yet to meet anyone who is not in this micro-cosmos who's even heard of it.
spondyl 9y ago
Hype feeding hype? On a side note, I've been using it at work and I'm actually quite liking it myself
pjmlp 9y ago
Maybe because it is a Google language, if it was done at company XYZ no one would care. Also because anyone jumping into the Docker/Kubernetes train eventually has to deal with Go.
H1Supreme 9y ago
I started with Go out of shear curiosity a few years ago. Built a few web backends with it, and a number of simple utility tools with it. I know this is a bit of a broken record line, but it's standard library and simplicity have made it something I naturally gravitate towards. Especially when I need to do something quick.
kej 9y ago
If you come from a Python/Ruby/JavaScript background (which is a lot of people), Go is a language that is not much more complex but will run faster and be easier to distribute. I can see that being a big appeal, especially compared to something like Rust or C++ which is going to require a lot more learning to become productive.

boffinism 9y ago

Note the salary graph that shows if you've got over 10 years experience you can either be an engineering manager (small cog in a big machine) and make a ton of money, or a CTO (big cog in probably a much smaller machine) and make 20% less.

zemo 9y ago
the CTO/CEO point probably reflects that people who start their own company AND take the SO developer survey always call themselves CTO or CEO. People don't start their own company and call themselves a developer or an engineering manager. CTO ... of what? Most startups will die before they ever have an engineering manager.
- pc86 9y ago
  C-suite is by definition close to the top but I wish more people would understand it also needs to be far from the bottom. You're not working on the types of things the C-suite works on unless you have a lot of people below you taking care of everything else.
codingdave 9y ago
That graph isn't showing years of experience vs. salary, it is showing average years of experience by role vs. salary. Most developers with more than 10 years experience are at the higher end (at least) of that graph, but those numbers just aren't what the graph represents.
WhompingWindows 9y ago
For average salaries, why does this survey not display the sample size and variance of these mean estimates? Also, I doubt that mean estimates are the best measure, rather than medians. I say that since salary data is probably multi-modally distributed with some very high earners and a largely left-skewed distribution with many low earners who do the grunt work / are less experienced.

d3ckard 9y ago

I was seriously surprised how popular VSCode has become. I know it's good, but for MS to win IT crowd that fast... kudos.

gtsteve 9y ago
It's a good text editor, and when I'm working with lots of Dockerfiles and Terraform configurations it's replaced Atom and Notepad++ as my go-to editor. The JavaScript editor's not half bad either. But for serious development, I don't think I'll be dropping Webstorm or Rider for it any time soon though.
tpush 9y ago
Visual Studio Code + the cquery extension is heaven for me coding in C/C++.
- jhasse 9y ago
  Also checkout Clang-Format. It's so awesome to mark some unintended code and have it formatted instantly in your editor with a key press. All while editing the file via the Git diff view :)

vivan 9y ago

One nitpick here - they refer to Angular as AngularJS - these are actually two different things. I don't quite remember but did the survey itself distinguish between the two? If not then this will skew the numbers upwards.

swyx 9y ago
i rather they be combined. I know they are different but one is the successor of the other.

Zitrax 9y ago

Any idea why salaries for C/C++ developers seem to be way below average in these stats?

bigcostooge 9y ago
International responses skew the salary data and make it useless.
- gota 9y ago
  This is true. It always feels weird answering these kinds of questions living outside of the US. You can easily have a salary that is several times the average of your country (I'm talking like 20x) and still make about half of what you'd make in the US, when shown in USD.
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  C++ is consistently less well paid than Java in the US and in the UK.
coffeeaddicted 9y ago
Least paid developer type is game development. And c++ is commonly used there.
taway_1212 9y ago
C/C++ are basically languages used only for technical products, while Java/web is used internally by pretty much every large company on Earth. This puts immense pressure on salaries.

matchilling 9y ago

Another #FunFact: Perl ranked number 5 in "What Languages Are Associated with the Highest Salaries Worldwide?" https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d...

vgy7ujm 9y ago
#1 in Perl programmer happiness also. (Not part of survey.) :)

fauigerzigerk 9y ago

The "Platforms" answers are hard to believe, or let's say it's hard for me to believe that they are remotely representative of the overall developer population. 18% claim to have done development work for macOS. That's more than for iOS, which is neck and neck with Raspberry Pi. What's going on here? Have web devs simply checked all platform boxes?

conradfr 9y ago
It's also really strange (to me) how no PHP frameworks or CMS made the cut.
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  WordPress is up there at 16%
  - conradfr 9y ago
    Ah yes, I was more thinking about the "Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools" section, my bad.
- mikro2nd 9y ago
  Really, really peculiar to me was that no blockchain platforms were included. Would have been particularly interesting imho in relation to salaries and experience levels.
pavlov 9y ago
I guess many misunderstood the question and answered macOS because they use a Mac for development.

arvinsim 9y ago

Whhy is the salary for F# developers high?

garganzol 9y ago
I assume that F# developers bring better business outcomes. I am both a C# and F# developer, and in my experience functional code (F#, OCaml etc) tends to be 5 times less buggy than an imperative equivalent. F# compiler does an impressive job of catching errors at compile time: this is the primary reason for better outcomes. The second significant contributing factor: functional code tends to have less side effects, and thus developers can reason about such code more realistically. A third contributing factor is lazy computations. Which leads to (surprise, surprise) better overall performance at runtime. Less bugs + Better performance = Higher salary Though I don't say F# is perfect. It has its quirks and there is a lot of room for future improvements.
- ageofwant 9y ago
  I'm led to believe F# is popular amongst the quants, quants work for the monied.
  - ozim 9y ago
    Agree so before jumping into learning F# keep in mind it does not go that way "Know F#" -> "high paid job". It is more probable that those guys were already in place where F# was useful so they started using it as best tool for the job. So they were already highly paid.
pryelluw 9y ago
There aren't that many of them. Companies using F# pay a premium.
shaki-dora 9y ago
I believe it has seen some significant adoption in finance.
suprfnk 9y ago

conradfr 9y ago

Two unrelated remarks: I'm surprised that Elixir was the 6th most loved language last year and disappeared this time, while Erlang gained some points. Was it even in the survey? Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
> Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist. How can you be labeled sexist if you point out a simple fact?
- yAnonymous 9y ago
  See this thread, for example.
- purple-again 9y ago
  You must be new to the internet. Hacker News has strong moderation so its one of the best asshole corner of the internet, but make no mistake, you are still in an asshole corner of the internet where you conform or are silenced.
- atom-morgan 9y ago
  Ask Damore.
  - salvar 9y ago
    Yes, he clearly only pointed out facts and nothing else. This is a fair and honest assessment of what happened.
- crispyporkbites 9y ago
  You already know the answer to this. The context of your fact-based statement is where it's meaning (and any offence/labeling) is derived from, not the fact itself, and in this case the person you are responding to is adding an additional fact without citation: This is the "simple" fact: > Women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in Assessing Jobs by Gender" in a StackOverflow survey targeted at people (mostly developers) who use stackoverflow This is the additional fact that has been added: > [that fact is] a contributing factor for the pay gap And then the phrase > you can be labeled as sexist is added, which of course can be applied to anything anyone ever says about anything gender related. If you deliberately add unsubstantiated information to a fact you will probably be called out for it, and rightly so (IMO).

garganzol 9y ago

>.NET Core Thanks they hadn't put a Silverlight instead of .NET. StackOverlow makes this mistake third year in a row. It is not .NET Core, it is .NET. .NET Core is just yet another implementation of .NET runtime.

james-skemp 9y ago
As a .NET developer, there's a difference between saying .NET and .NET Core, however. You can be interested in .NET Core but not in .NET in general if you're looking for cross-platform applications, for example. Having used .NET for almost a decade, I think I selected .NET Core for a couple options since I hadn't been able to learn about the differences. And there's pretty significant differences, especially tooling support (like the inability to really do database-first as easily as you can with .NET). So, I think it's fine.

austincheney 9y ago

Coming from the web world I find the term "back end developer" a heavily abused term. Most developers of web products would consider themselves back-end developers and typically program in either Java (or one of its variants) or C#. This isn't back-end merely because it isn't in a browser. Your average web product Java developer is all middleware. They write code that gels between internal services and output to the user environment. At most large web companies real back-end teams are heavily isolated and don't let the middleware people come anywhere close to them even if they are all writing in the same language. If your web-product Java developer needs data they call to a service managed by an unrelated team.

xpavlic4 9y ago

I like how Scala is connected to Spark and Hadoop but nothing else...

Froyoh 9y ago

Was very surprised about the gender ratio: 92.7% Male, 6.8% Female, 0.9% Non-binary, 0.7% Transgender

executesorder66 9y ago
What were you expecting?
- yAnonymous 9y ago
  Not a multiple choice answer, for one.
- Froyoh 9y ago
  A lot more females?
  - executesorder66 9y ago
    Like 10% more or like 40% more females? I get that a lot of people want more diversity in Tech, but honestly it's just not something most girls are interested in. If you saw the following gender ratios for pre-shcool teachers: 92.7% Female, 6.8% Male, 0.9% Non-binary, 0.7% Transgender Would you be surprised? Would you think more men need help "getting into the industry" since they are underrepresented? Or would you think that most guys just don't want to do that for a job/career?
culot 9y ago
A non-binary coder? How does that even work? :P
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
branx 9y ago
I was confused about this one - Transgender isn't a gender, it's a change of gender. Why would it be a selection? Wouldn't a trans person identify with M or F?

benkuhn 9y ago

It's a little disappointing to see so many developers--maybe on average the most comfortable job in the world right now--prioritizing comforts like compensation, using their favorite languages, or remote work, over helping to improve the world. Over 45% of men prioritized one of the above three, whereas a mere 6.5% prioritized "How widely used or impactful the product or service I'd be working on is." Revealingly, "How much impact I could have by working there" isn't even an option. Sounds like the survey authors didn't even consider that people might actively care about improving the world. So many developers have comfort to spare! Maybe spend a little bit more optimization power on trying to accomplish something important?

s_dev 9y ago
>prioritizing comforts like compensation, using their favorite languages, or remote work, over helping to improve the world. Compensation isn't a comfort -- it's more like payment which is necessary. Not really something a developer could forgo. Regarding languages -- why would they not want to leverage their knowledge to get more compensation?
- calcifer 9y ago
  > Compensation isn't a comfort Sure it is. If you can "be fine" with $X, but are looking for a job that pays $Y (where $Y>$X), then that's seeking comfort.
  - crispyporkbites 9y ago
    $X directly relates to when I retire, so I see a high salary as buying time and freedom
lozenge 9y ago
How have you had an impact? I'm curious because when I looked, the impact I could have through my job (at the cost of 2,000 hours a year) seemed quite small, and the impact of donating high. I'm aware the topic has been covered in great detail, eg by the organization 80,000 hours. You are happy doing something because of its impact, but to expect everybody else to seems very presumptive. Edit: just noticed who you are ha ha

lucideer 9y ago

I quite enjoy the irony that Coffeescript—a language apparently invented to make Javascript more palatable—is the third most dreaded language in the survey.

purple-again 9y ago
Atom is written entirely in Javascript and I can edit it however I want??? Thats AWESOME! Wait its written in coffescript...fuck you. That's a replay of a real life experience that went down when I first heard of Atom.
- andrewmcwatters 9y ago
  The more layers you add, the less inclusive it becomes. Coffeescript is decidedly a divisive technology.
zmmmmm 9y ago
I think the "dreaded" category is quite complex and hard to interpret. People can dread a language for a bunch different reasons that aren't necessarily related to the attributes of the language, or even how much it is intrinsically liked. One is a class of language where people run into it incidentally without having any deep experience, but are forced to interact with it, and find it very unpleasant. Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin, but also one of the most dreaded languages, I think because there's a large number of people whose only encounter with it ever is when there's something wrong with their Gradle script that they can't figure out. Coffeescript could be a similar kind of case.
- vorg 9y ago
  > Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin Things have changed in the past few years. I would now put Apache Groovy in a different tier than those other two. Kotlin's rise has been at Groovy's (as well as Java's) expense. So nowadays I would rank JVM language adoption as these tiers: 1. Java 2. Kotlin, Scala 3. Clojure, Groovy 4. others, e.g. JRuby, Ceylon

pythonaut_16 9y ago

I'm surprised Vue doesn't show up on the list anywhere. From everything I've seen Vue should probably show up in either the loved or wanted categories.

megaman22 9y ago
I'm not sure anybody outside of HN readership knows about Vue at all. It's either Angular, old Angular, or React everywhere.
- janneklouman 9y ago
  Don't you think that's a bit naïve? Take this anecdotal counterevidence for instance: none of the four people I work with visit HN but all know of Vue.
forgot-my-pw 9y ago
Maybe because the docs are good enough and easy to understand. I can't remember if I ever looked up things on SO for Vue.

pjmlp 9y ago

Nice to see C++ on the loved languages section, while C only deserved an entry on the dreaded ones above C++ and has half of the wanted percentage.

jgh 9y ago
Other than the verbosity the new versions of C++ are so much nicer to work with than C++03. C++17 is even better, constexpr if simplifying templates, structured bindings (though I wish there was an ignore option), optionals, if the C++ standards committee isn't careful they might end up with an enjoyable language in a decade or so.

adumbledore 9y ago

I am not sure about you, but as my career as a developer progressed I rely less on Stack Overflow today as I did in the past. To me it seems that this survey may have a strong bias.

ryandrake 9y ago

> Most developers feel that management is ultimately most accountable for unethical results of code. Just under 20% of respondents said that a developer who writes code used for unethical purposes is most responsible. This kind of surprised me. On the one hand, we complain about being considered code monkeys and mere "implementors," but on the other hand, if we're asked to code something unethical, well "we're just following orders." I personally think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our responsibility to no do harm. Ask doctors this survey question and see the wildly different results.

kamaal 9y ago
>>I personally think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our responsibility to no do harm. Not possible in most companies where your career depends being a yes man to the management. You would be surprised how often doing the right thing gets people fired. Of course you could say 'grow spine' or whatever. But you can't suffer for ever in a ecosystem where everything is stacked against you. At some point in putting food on the table takes precedence.
lightbyte 9y ago
I think that one result is a bit misleading. 79.6% said they consider the ethical implications of what they are asked to do. 82.3% said they would report ethical concerns in some form. 58.5% said they would refuse to write code they thought was not ethical (36.6% said they are unsure).
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Good point. I was also puzzled by that result, given the responses to the question I mentioned. The picture it paints is that software professionals feel their duty is to consider, complain, and (less so) refuse, but ultimately responsibility lies elsewhere.
pascalxus 9y ago
You should certainly report it to the appropriate managers. But, ultimately, ethics is highly subjective: and it's not your choice. You've sold your time to the company and have to produce the products it makes: even if you don't like their ads or product. You can say no, they can fire you and hire someone just like you and the product would still get made. Being a doctor or developer is entirely different. The doctor has much more freedom in deciding a course of action. As a developer you have very little power to decide what get's produced, because it's not your job function: that's what product managers are for.

ropans808 9y ago

What are people finding so dreadful about Redshift?

scapecast 9y ago
I think I can answer that, given we're in the business of Redshift performance. Redshift is incredibly powerful, but can be a pain to work with if you're a data engineer. To get the most out of it, you need to turn a lot of knobs - and knowing how to tune it is really complex. But if you get it right - it blows everything else out of the water. Including Snowflake and BigQuery. The key to success is using Redshift's Workload Management, and using best practices for your schema, table and query design. Many people who start using Redshift come from a mySQL world and are not familiar with a columnar storage db. Sort / dist keys are not concepts that people are necessarily familiar with.

erikb 9y ago

Do people not know that there is a database called Hana? Honestly before my time at SAP I also didn't know but I thought it's my personal failing.

dwhabcdefg 9y ago

As a queer female go programmer with over 15 years of programming experience, I did not realize how much of a statistical outlier I am. Neat. (I have trouble adopting the mantle of minority, as a well-paid middle-aged white person).

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
smoyer 9y ago
As a straight male Kotlin wannabe with over 35 years of programming experience (with the first 20+ years paired with hardware development), I'm also going to refuse to be categorized (nothing wrong with Cobol but I like the new shiny things the youngin's are playing with). I think the most interesting facet of software (the cerebral creation of something out of nothing) is that there's a way for everyone to contribute in a way they find enjoyable.
dmh2000 9y ago
I just graduated to the elite 0.3% group, '65 or older'. Like you I like being an outlier.

dyeje 9y ago

What's up with Rails not being included in the Frameworks section when Django and Node.js are? According to Google Trends, Django and Rails have similar interest: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2Fm%2F06y_qx,%2Fm%2F0bbxf89 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2F...

cpburns2009 9y ago
That's weird. Also, can Node.js even be considered a framework? Isn't it just a run-time system?
- jxub 9y ago
  This illustrates the confusion about JS in general.
karimf 9y ago
Yeah i guess they don't include Rails as an option? Like other comment said, the survey probably didn't include Elixir as well, even though Elixir got a nice rank last year. As a Rails developer, it's sad the number for Rails is far behind Django. This might make some confusion for people who are deciding which MVP framework to use.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

Remember that this data is representative of Stack Overflow's audience, not of the entire industry.

gizmo385 9y ago
I'd say that a pretty representative swath of the industry visits StackOverflow. What segment of the industry do you think is missing in this representation?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Different sectors of the industry use StackOverflow in varying amounts. Systems programmers on the whole probably use SO a lot less than JavaScript programmers, for example. More senior engineers use it less than more junior engineers. And so on.
- astura 9y ago
  I've visited SO but I've never made an account, took a survey, or even know a survey existed.
andrewmcwatters 9y ago
yeah those incomes are telling

Dowwie 9y ago

Who Is Ultimately Most Responsible for Code That Accomplishes Something Unethical? 19.7% voted "the developer who wrote it" Do Developers Have an Obligation to Consider the Ethical Implications of Their Code? 79.6% voted "Yes"

gemma 9y ago
I initially bumped on this one too, but "obligation to consider" doesn't mean "obligation to quit their jobs over". You consider the ethical implications, you push back against management, management tells you sit down. Are you now obligated to quit? If you decide to keep your job, knowing that the code will be written either way, are you now ultimately responsible for it? (Completely unrelated but the first thing that came to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0)

kej 9y ago

Results aside, I really dislike the presentation of different data sets in separate tabs. If I want to see the difference between all developers and professionals, or between genders, I have to click back and forth when it could have all been presented in one chart to begin with.

pascalxus 9y ago

There seem to be a lot more young developers than old developers. But, why? I can only assume that either, the number of developers is increasing (more and more young people entering the work force), or a lot of people stop being software engineers after 8 years. People usually work between the ages 22 and 65, so given a even distribution, if the industry isn't growing by leaps and bounds, the average work experience should eventually be about 20 years with an average age of 42.

astura 9y ago
Don't take this too seriously. It's a self selected group of people. Most professional developers didn't take the survey and it's didn't corrected for any variables.
mywittyname 9y ago
Growth of technology and an increase in job openings. Plus, a bit of cultural shift too. I think a lot of older developers grew up during a time when spending a lot of time using technology was considered weird. While today, not using technology all the time is what is weird. Also, software developers are much more highly regarded by young people now than ever before. There's this image of the young, rich entrepreneur creating products that everyone loves, and people want to be this. So a lot more smart people get into the industry because it's the cool place to be, hence the rise of "brogrammers."
SamuelAdams 9y ago
It could also be that more experienced developers don’t have time to take surveys.
heedlessly2 9y ago
there's a lot of students. Students and younger devs need to ask more questions, so they have a more active presence. While an older dev may still need to ask questions, they can just google, and find the answer without needing to create an account.

mherrmann 9y ago

I think it's interesting how VS Code jumped from 5th place among web developers in 2017 [1] to first place [2]. This made Sublime Text lose a place, putting it in third. If I were ST's Jon Skinner, I would not be happy about having M$ as a (free!) competitor. [1]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-popular-developer-environments-by-occupation https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-mo... [2]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-most-popular-development-environments https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-m...

pascalxus 9y ago

It looks like most people stay at a job for just a year or 2. But, it would have been interesting to see a question as to why they left: were they forced out due to something the company did, or did they leave of their own accord for a higher salary (that was top ranked for how they assess a job)?

dmh2000 9y ago

In the section "Valuing Compensation and Benefits by Geography", I was surprised that Germany (13.7%) and Canada (9.7%) showed similar results to the USA (11.5%) on the relative value of health insurance as part of compensation. I thought they had that covered.

royalghost 9y ago

Good!

zbentley 9y ago

The "Why Do Developers Participate in Hackathons?" question is missing an answer option that I suspect is distressingly common: employer-mandated hackathon participation. Multiple places I've worked, and many places I've heard about from my peers, require employees to participate (either as a "this is just mandatory" requirement or as a "this influences a milestone on your performance review" requirement) in company-sponsored or external hackathons. This trend is somewhat distressing and deserves to be highlighted, I think.