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2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

235 points by joaomoreno 8y ago

bbsimonbb 8y ago
70 percent of male developers rate themselves as above average. 50 percent of women do. Dunning Kruger anyone ?
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  The competence vs years graph is interesting to me because over time things converge, but women and non-binary folks are significantly less confident in the early/mid career.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Not necessarily. Women on average reported less experience than men. This would mean we would expect the opposite self-ratings if the Dunning-Kruger effect was at play.
  - lalaithion 8y ago
    The question asked for responses to be normalized based on experience level.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I seem to remember reading about similar results when people were asked if they are above average drivers.
- Chris2048 8y ago
  Not only are there issues of subjectivity, such as DK effect, the survey itself also has selection bias, so there is no average ground-truth to compare against.
andy_adams 8y ago
Can someone help this old (2^5 years) developer out? I've worked with a number of programming languages over the years, and have never found a combination that brings me such joy and productivity as Ruby and Rails. However, I've always felt that Python and Ruby were very similar in style & goal. Can someone who is experienced in both Rails & Django explain why Python & Django are trending up so quickly, while Ruby & Rails are ranking on the "most dreaded" lists? I don't want this to become a holy war, I am just genuinely curious what I'm overlooking.
- JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
  Whilst I'm pretty heavily experienced in Rails I'm less-so in Django. If I had to guess Rails being dreaded is down to experienced Rails veterans wanting to move onto the new hotness, and the rise of Python / Django being simply down to the fact that people newly getting into web development are far more likely to know Python than Ruby.
- WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
  Rails' power came from the gems, once the development shifts from there, Rails became a problem to maintain. I'm liking React more now since you get the full power (and clusterfuck) of npm.
  - thrownaway954 8y ago
    Rails 5 has webpacker embedded, you can use npm packages in your projects.
- hodder 8y ago
  Django is likely rising because Python is rising. Most people are learning Python as their first language, and Django is a logical tool for them to try to build web apps.
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maze-le 8y ago
Wow, jQuery is still one of the most popular web frameworks. That was unexpected...
- rooam-dev 8y ago
  I didn't know it's a web framework.
- JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
  To be honest it doesn't surprise me hugely. Whilst jQuery is hardly the best choice these days the simple fact is that such a ridiculous amount of libraries and plugins use it that it's sort of hard to avoid it. Don't get me wrong - I completely understand why you wouldn't want to use it if you can help it, but honestly, for many uses it's still not a bad choice in my honest opinion.
- andy_adams 8y ago
  I think the questions are formulated as such: "What web framework(s) do you use?", and respondents can pick as many as they want. That would explain the popularity: It's hard for me to think of a website I've touched that doesn't use jQuery, even if only for a small part.
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  I'm working on a local government site at the moment. I have 5 different tabs open for reference. 5 out of 5 are importing a jQuery library. Considering it's age and integration with Bootstrap (among others), it's not that surprising.
- losthobbies 8y ago
  It’s also one of the most dreaded?!
  - Izkata 8y ago
    It has a reputation for spaghetti code. Just as it's the simplest to reach for, it's the simplest to hack something together with, with no thought to overall structure.
the_arun 8y ago
When we say percentage - the numbers are not adding up to 100. How are we supposed to read this report?
- trymas 8y ago
  Multi answer questions in the survey may explain that?
  - the_arun 8y ago
    I see. One way of calculating % in multiple choice is ((total No. of C likers)/ total count of answers) * 100 to get % of popularity of C.
    - fxfan 8y ago
      You can just add all the percentages and divide by that number and you'll get the number you're talking about.
- andy_adams 8y ago
  Respondents are allowed to choose multiple answers for each question, so the totals != 100%.
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  Typically this indicates a multiple choice question, e.g. Choose the languages you are comfortable programming in. Then the percentage indicates the number of respondents who selected that / the total number of responses.
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strictnein 8y ago
> "almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly." Not at all. It's a self selecting survey, the people who choose to answer are likely more confident in their abilities than those that don't, and, contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average. Average != median
- Allower 8y ago
  Dunning-Kruger effect is still a thing unsurprisingly
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > Average != median Unless given an explicit definition, the word "average" has been abused to an extent that it's currently meaningless.
- piaste 8y ago
  > contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average. Average != median For this kind of question ('is X above/below average?'), however, I would expect that people are _actually_ thinking of the median. Consider a high Gini-coefficient country, where the income distribution looks like this: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 999999. If you ask people 'is the person earning 5 above or below average?' they will say he is above average, even though he is actually above the median and below the average.
- marvin 8y ago
  Plus: There are so many aspects of software engineering that 70% can easily be above average (or the median) in at least one of them. It's like asking drivers if they're better or worse than average. The skill hasn't been defined with a clear metric. It's lazy to just pin this on dishonesty or hubris on the part of the respondents.
- wainstead 8y ago
  > It's a self selecting survey I feel like I have to point this out every year, and it's one of the most important things to keep in mind about this survey. A true survey would randomly select developers from the global developer population at large.
SolaceQuantum 8y ago
"Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem." Interesting. Isn't the former a subset of the latter?
- Pfhreak 8y ago
  non-development work is a subset of toxic work environments? No. I don't think so. Depends on how you identify development work. Is documentation, test-writing, requirements gathering, planning, backlog grooming, educating, or advocating considered non-development work? (I think all that stuff pretty clearly falls under the purview of 'developer', but I've gotten a lot of feedback from folks over the years who think it's not.) Toxic work environment can include things like sexual harassment, micro and macro aggressions, offensive language (I had a manager for a while who called his reports 'motherfuckers), etc. I wouldn't normally consider non-development work to be 'toxic' in the same way I'd consider, say, working with someone who consistently talks down to women and minorities.
  - ThorinJacobs 8y ago
    To add onto your comment - I'd also consider a work environment that automatically assigns the documentation, test-writing, etc. to a gender minority (or other minority) to be toxic.
- sidlls 8y ago
  No. Software development for any non-trivial project requires more than just slapping a few requirements down on paper and then flinging code into an editor.
- bluGill 8y ago
  No, there is some overlap, but most non-development tasks are not really toxic, just overhead. I have to interview other developers. This is not a part of a toxic work environment (in fact it can prevent them). Toxic work environment be entirely development, for instance if they put your computer in the bathroom I'd call that toxic. I suspect most females mean some form of sexual harassment is tolerated. This is a big problem that men tend to culturally ignore.
headalgorithm 8y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614674 for more discussion
umvi 8y ago
> We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly. I'm torn here. It's hard to correct for bias. It would be like if a bank had a survey and had people rate their financial stability - but they had to have an account with the bank to participate in the survey. Wouldn't that bias the results in favor of financially responsible people? I'd be interested how many 0 rep new accounts with lots of downvotes claimed high competence vs. established accounts. It could very well be that people with SO accounts who are willing to take the time for SO's survey are the type of people that are more competent on average than developers that don't have SO accounts and don't participate in surveys.
- hnarn 8y ago
  You have a point. It's not hard to imagine that actually using SO in the first place might correlate to you being an above average developer (among all developers).
  - Semaphor 8y ago
    While I neither disagree nor agree, I've heard people claim the opposite: That people on SO are generally below average.
    - commandlinefan 8y ago
      Well, maybe the people asking questions are below and the people answering them are above.
    - deleted 8y ago
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kyoob 8y ago
Odd that Perl isn't mentioned anywhere, good or bad, in these results. It's usually at least in there among the Most Dreaded. Was it not listed as an option this year?
- kbenson 8y ago
  From the methodology section: We used data from last year’s survey and trends in tags on Stack Overflow to identify which technologies to include on the survey this year. We prioritized popular and fast growing technologies, considering which smaller or shrinking technologies we could remove this year. So, I think it possibly wasn't listed as an option. Something to consider next time one of these reports is cited as evidence for or against something, as editorial discretion may or may not wildly change the meaning of the less popular items. In this case it may have been the difference between an item being included but lowly ranked and not included at all, which without additional information implies it didn't rank enough to be shown, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not (but I have my doubts that WebAssembly outranks Perl).
- 59nadir 8y ago
  As far as I can remember it wasn't available as an option, no. Nor was Haskell, Common Lisp and a host of other languages.
claudiulodro 8y ago
Interesting that WordPress is the most dreaded tech every single year for the last 3+ years, yet WP "market share" is increasing every single year (it's now powering 1/3 of the web). Is it a disconnect between developers and non-developers? Is it just that developers don't like to work on "boring" tech, and working on WP is not a super-great resume builder? Curious to hear what people think.
- andy_adams 8y ago
  Having built lots of WordPress sites over the years, I can give you 2 strong reasons why it continues to grow, despite being disliked by software engineers: 1. There is no easier way to set up a standard marketing/business website, despite many quality attempts to build replacements. The plugin library is a big part of this. 2. It's extremely easy for anyone to start hacking on, leading to lots of developers "cutting their teeth" on WordPress by following online tutorials. Show me a self-taught front-end developer and I'll be shocked if they didn't learn on a WordPress site. This has good & bad aspects, of course.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  It's horrible to work with, but it pays the bills, so people work with it. It's a testament to how being non-technical friendly leads to market success.
- user5994461 8y ago
  Wordpress sites are easily done without any development work. There are many platforms providing ready to use wordpress sites, with nice themes and common needs covered. It is not targeted toward developers at all. Comparing wordpress and developers, is a bit like comparing how many people like tyres (everybody got some on their car) to how many people enjoy making tyres for a living (not a very common activity).
  - claudiulodro 8y ago
    That makes sense. Good analogy!
atonse 8y ago
Kudos to the Visual Studio Code team for all its success. VS Code and TypeScript, are kinds of technologies and tools that just win entirely on their strong merit, in spite the image of who has created them. .NET Core is getting up there too. MS has always been a developer friendly company but they are definitely earning mindshare back from non .NET developers.
- strikelaserclaw 8y ago
  Microsoft seems to be killing it lately.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    They're killing usability, [1] user control [2] and eBooks [3], I'll give you that. Soon they'll even be killing innocent civilians. [4] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-new-study-shows-home-edition-users-are-baffled-by-updates/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-new-study-shows-hom... [2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-firefox-chrome-installation-on-windows-10/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-fir... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 [4] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/nadella-microsoft-will-sell-war-tech-to-democracies-to-protect-freedoms/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/nadella-microsoft-wi...
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mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Bittersweet to see how much “distracting work environment” is reported to reduce productivity, given that companies abjectly refuse to provide private & quiet workspaces despite it being unequivocally cost effective to do so even for most start-ups in dense urban centers. I continue to find the discussion of salary disappointing though. The survey provides a good opportunity for more detailed information.
- umvi 8y ago
  I personally find non-private settings where you can easily collaborate with other developers more productive. When I am alone in an office, there is a higher temptation to waste time on reddit/youtube and I am less likely to talk to other developers outside of IM apps. But when I'm in an open office/lab environment I find I'm more likely to stay on task and also more likely to get unstuck on something thanks to close proximity to other developers. Everyone is different.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    You occupy such an extreme minority among knowledge workers that, as a matter of default policy, your view has to be discounted in favor of privacy and quiet conditions. However, it’s easy enough for employers to provide both private & quiet offices and separate areas for constant collaboration and ambient chatter, allowing people to choose which type of area they want their primary workspace to be located in.
    - umvi 8y ago
      > However, it’s easy enough for employers to provide both private & quiet offices and separate areas for constant collaboration and ambient chatter To clarify: this is my situation. I have an office and an open lab in which to work. Usually I eat lunch in my office but find myself working in the lab most of the day because of the perceived increased productivity
Pfhreak 8y ago
I'm a non-binary manager who was formerly a non-binary engineer. I use singular they. I've had people go out of their way to make my professional life more challenging or insulting. But it makes me happy to see nonbinary/nonconforming identities addressed in this survey. Our experience of the tech world is very different, and it's great to see some acknowledgment of that.
- Dumblydorr 8y ago
  What is non binary? I haven't heard that before. Can you share some experiences?
  - faitswulff 8y ago
    You should search for the term + "gender", but the long and short of it is that certain folks don't feel particularly compelled to identify as "male" OR "female" and thus identify as a non-binary (!(M|F)) gender.
    - mmmeff 8y ago
      Honest question: what does this have to do with software development?
      - deleted 8y ago
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      - Pfhreak 8y ago
        Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women. So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns. And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.
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ChrisRR 8y ago
As with every year, take these result with a massive pinch of salt. The results are heavily weighted by students and young developers who are way more likely to chase the latest trends and buzzwords
- fj39dkf 8y ago
  The survey provides specific numbers on this, no need for the pinch of salt: 41% of respondents have fewer than 5 years of professional experience, and 68% have fewer than 10. A better question is whether or not this experience distribution is representative of all software engineers. It almost certainly isn't, because it's only surveying "people who respond to stack overflow surveys", but it's hard to know how different it is. All that said, there is no need for the quip about trends and buzzwords. Of course younger developers are more interested in new technologies - they have a whole future career they need to plan for. One might just as easily and meanly say that old developers refuse to learn new things because they're just going to retire in 10 years.
  - ChrisRR 8y ago
    I know they're stated, that's where I got the info from! Unfortunately every year people start taking the results from these and jumping to conclusions, like practically everyone is a full-stack, Node JS developer who contributes to open source 7 days a week. We know that's not true but it doesn't stop article after article every year claiming things like that.
bad_good_guy 8y ago
I actually found this to be the most interesting excerpt from the survey results >In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they deal with a mental health challenge, a higher proportion than other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany, or India. I would be interested to know just how much a higher proportion it was than other countries.
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measure2xcut1x 8y ago
As a solo indie developer running my own saas business for 20+ years now, and rarely interacting with other devs, this survey is priceless. I often wonder where I and my stack/tools are in relation to the rest of the field. This report (even if it is biased or skewed) makes me feel like I'm not alone and gives me some validation on my life path and technology choices.
- leowoo91 8y ago
  "He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass" - Edgar Fiedler
- astura 8y ago
  I wouldn't put any stake in this survey as any sort of representation of the field in any way whatsoever. The people with SO accounts who even are even aware that SO is conducting a survey is so self-selecting that its in zero way any sort of representation of the industry as a whole. For example, in SO's survey 80% of respondents say they code as a hobby. If this survey was not self selecting I'd bet the farm that it would be the reverse - 80% didn't code as a hobby.
  - saghm 8y ago
    Is "coding as a hobby" intended to be mutually exclusive with "coding professionally"? If not, I don't think I'd be that surprised by the 80% number even if it came from a source that everyone agreed was statistically significant.
- jaabe 8y ago
  I think it’s more interesting that if I load up a job-index site or search for techs on linked in, you get a significantly different picture of what is actually “wanted”. Maybe that’s from being Scandinavian but 90% of our jobmarket is still .Net framework (not core), JAVA and PHP.
vturner 8y ago
Curious about the salaries for the top four paying technology languages. Three of the four for US are functional focused languages, and for global all four are functional focused. As someone learning Scala, this is both encouraging and interesting, and I'm curious as to any explanation to the table result. Do functional programming languages increase developer productivity so significantly that a single developer can command such compensation? Do these languages attract highly productive developers whom the market compensates for their productivity? Something else?
- 666lumberjack 8y ago
  I would imagine it's partly a reflection of the classic Python paradox. Developers who'll go out of their way to learn a new language and paradigm before it's mainstream are more likely to be highly talented. Companies that are using less popular languages rather than sticking with the default are more likely to take hiring high quality engineers seriously and pay them well.
- mook 8y ago
  Alternative possibility (that I just made up on the spot): the people who get to choose what language to work in, ignoring the popularity of the language (and therefore how easy they are to replace) are already in very senior positions. More junior people do not get the opportunity to work in functional languages.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    It's half of that. On the chart "Salary and Experience by Language", people doing functional languages have much more experience. The other half is location. There are only few functional programming jobs, highly skewed toward the big cities with higher salary and costs of living.
- tormeh 8y ago
  Scala is the language for big data. It's also used in minor roles for hardware synthesis, finance etc., but big data is where it dominates other languages. Big data pays well.
geodel 8y ago
So Scala is among most dreaded right below Java at 41.7%. Considering in popularity it's quite low at 3.8%, it seem surprising to me.
- commandlinefan 8y ago
  I'm glad to see it isn't just me.
Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
Gone are the days when developers defined their job as 'X-programmer'(X being the language) or at-least in India as platform e.g Java platform. Companies have realised that programming languages are like 'drill bit in a tool box', one needs to use the best bit for the job.
- purity_resigns 8y ago
  The only folks I ever here say "the right tool for the job" are Java devs. /s In all seriousness, people using non-mainstream languages are very attached to them. At least in my sample size of one.
ksec 8y ago
1. I don't quite understand why people love Rust. I have nothing against it but I just don't quite get why the love. I viewed it as Modern C++ with Memory Management done right from Engineering perspective and elegant syntax with package management done right from the beginning. And may be just my circle or reading list, many Rubyist jumped to Rust, and more often after trying a few times and clicked, they felt in love with it. 2. Ruby = Rails. ~8.5% of Ruby Developers and there are 8.2% of Rails Developers. 3. Ruby / Rails are for many years split in love and dreaded languages and framework. ~50% on both side. I don't see any other languages and framework has similar pattern. 4. There are more Django / Laravel developers than Ruby Rails. 5. ~60% of Developers are on Windows. That was obvious right? And yet Ruby / Rails Community has ignore the Windows as a development platform for years. [1] My guess it is the lack of resources. 6. Speaking of Resources, Ruby is the top programming language that is surviving without a Major Cooperation ( Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple ) backing. 7. Ruby 's Median salary, comparatively speaking is trending on the higher side. And also one of the highest with respective of lower years of experience. That is both good and bad. Developers get higher salary, but less company are willing to choose it for cost reason. 8. Am I correct to assume those Salaries exclude any Stock grant? Which is common in US? 9. Visual Studio Code really is taking over, and there are more performance improvement coming. [2] I wonder if they would consider moving to WASM in the future. 10. Financial and banking - 8.9%, are the third in respondent's industry. I am a little surprise how many people are working in that field. 11. 60% of them prefer to work in office . THAT is great to hear. Not every one likes working from home or Remote. May be those who prefer to work from home are just very vocal about it. 12. And it is for that reason 80% of them prefer to have a Face to Face conversation. As easy as it is to type, write, calling or even Video conference, I still believe there is something when two people sit together and communicate. There is something that goes far beyond words coming out. [1] https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-windows-for-6-years-while-developing-discourse https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-w... [2] https://twitter.com/kaimaetzel/status/1114908539342864384?s=20 https://twitter.com/kaimaetzel/status/1114908539342864384?s=...
- manaskarekar 8y ago
  > I viewed it as Modern C++ with Memory Management done right from Engineering perspective and elegant syntax with package management done right from the beginning That is a big deal in and of itself.
Dumblydorr 8y ago
Can someone explain why rust is so beloved? Also I work in R primarily, I find it funny that love and dread are both near 50%.
- mmmeff 8y ago
  I just started working through a textbook to learn Rust, coming from a heavy Typescript/Node background. It's too soon to say whether or not I'm in love but I already really like the approach to lower level programming with modern development perks like linting (RLS), package management (Cargo), simple build scripts (Cargo again). Comparing it to NPM+Node, there's a lot to like. I'm really looking forward to learning more.
  - Takizawa 8y ago
    Rust has an elegant concept in its ownership paradigm. As the Rust book mentions: Ownership is Rust’s most unique feature, and it enables Rust to make memory safety guarantees without needing a garbage collector. In other words, you have the power/speed of a low level language without certain of the dangers, such as "double free" errors. (That said, I'm only now proceeding through the official book. In other words, if I got this wrong, someone correct me.)
- bad_good_guy 8y ago
  Disclaimer: This is personal observation. Fetishization of low-level languages by primarily Javascript developers, plus it has the same socially liberal online community that Javascript has, due to Mozilla. I hope this comment doesn't portray any bias.
  - fj39dkf 8y ago
    Can you elaborate on what you mean by "socially liberal"? Which language communities are on the other side of the spectrum?
- alkonaut 8y ago
  For me: because the languages that it is supposed to replace ie the C-style curly brace Lang’s in the systems/low-level/backend niches are all pretty bad. And a lot of us have used them for a decade or three so we are very aware of what’s bad. If you come from Java/C# and discover the speed of C without the pain of C, or if you come from C/C++ and notice life with decent compiler messages, a nice package manager, sane modules etc. - that’s a fantastic feeling.
ivm 8y ago
Top highlights: > 11% of our respondents said they didn't want to communicate with their fellow human beings via either method [face-to-face conversations or online chat] and > The aspects of Stack Overflow that respondents would like to change exhibit differences across demographic groups. For example, developers who are men are more likely to want change in official site rules (from the algorithms behind them to how they are enforced), while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site. The top words used by women to describe SO's problems include "condescending", "rude", "assholes".
iLemming 8y ago
Clojure did it again. Most paid language.
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  And pretty well loved too! Now if only we could figure out how to get it up from the bottom of “most wanted” language.
jedberg 8y ago
> Do Developers Need to Become Managers to Make More Money? 50% said no. I think this is naive. We've had this discussion on HN before. Companies pay lip service to the idea that they have parallel tracks for management and engineering, but the reality of it is that it takes far more success to move up the engineering ladder. You can be one of the very best engineers in your company, or one of many hundreds of senior managers, and make the same money. If you look at how many people are at each salary level, the higher you go, the worse the ratio gets of management to engineer. If you want to get to the highest levels of the engineering ladder, you have to be one of the most well known engineers in the world. Or be a VP. It's not easy to be a VP, but there are far more VPs out there than Distinguished Engineers.
- scottbreyfogle 8y ago
  I think this is an example of developers taking questions quite literally: You don't need to become a manager, but many (myself included) would admit that it does help. You also might want to take into account the age and seniority of most developers on the platform - for someone with <10 years of experience, it's likely that you absolutely have an avenue to make more money without becoming a manager.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    That is fair. For many of the young developers who responded to the survey, they probably have a ways to go before they start hitting compensation walls.
- MrTonyD 8y ago
  Another aspect is autonomy. It is routine in most companies for a low level incompetent manager to be able to waste all the time and talent of a senior engineer. So the issue is more than just money.
- l9k 8y ago
  This also depends on the country and its work culture. For instance, a senior engineer can be valued and respected internally, and paid accordingly in the US. In a country like France, where technical talent means little (except for very rare and niche skills), engineers usually transition early to managing positions if they can.
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codeforester 8y ago
Is anyone surprised seeing Bash/shell scripting being so popular? In my experience, I have seen very few people taking Bash scripting seriously. And it is frowned upon in tech interviews.
- davemp 8y ago
  Shell scripting just comes with the turf wrt Linux. Even just editing your `.bashrc` can technically be considered scripting. Elsewhere in the survey ~50% of devs claimed to used Linux, so it doesn't seem unreasonable.
b3b0p 8y ago
Regarding the most dreaded languages, 3 (C, Objective-C, Assembly) of the top 4 probably my favorites actually. I find working with and developing in C (Objective-C in iOS/macOS) and doing assembly the most fun I have had and look forward to. Maybe it's because right now I only do it for hobby. What makes it the most dreaded? My only guess is having to maintain legacy code that's hard to understand or poorly written or another valid reason. I'd love to get into an embedded C / assembly role. I got pulled into web development early on, but I had a friend who was stubborn and held out and ended up coding games for casinos in C/C++ in Linux and SDL. I'm so jealous.
insomniacity 8y ago
Can anyone enlighten me as to why Heroku is the number 3 most dreaded platform (behind Wordpress and IBM Cloud/Watson)? From my hobbyist exposure it's pretty awesome. I understand it's expensive for production... but why do people dread working on it?
- fgonzag 8y ago
  I would guess in absolute terms it must be dreaded by a lot of people simply because of it's extremely large user base. Any product is bound to rub someone the wrong way.
  - insomniacity 8y ago
    Fair point, but it's not an absolute figure. % of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so Heroku 47.3%
tuna-piano 8y ago
I think the most interesting portion was the "Developer's perspectives by gender". When asked what one thing they would change about Stack Overflow: Women used the following words more often (compared to men): condescending, replies, nicer, rude, dumb, friendlier, assholes, thanks, confusing, knowing. While men used the following words: simpler, huge, banned, angular, official, complex, algorithm, expert, bounty, force. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019&utm_content=launch-blog#community-_-developers-perspectives-by-gender https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...
- montieferg 7y ago
  fascinating
chillee 8y ago
VSCode has seriously dominated these lists since its release in 2016. Overall: 2016: 7.2% 2017: N/A 2018: 34.9% 2019: 50.7% Web: 2016: Unranked 2017: 24.0% 2018: 38.7% 2019: 55.6% Mobile: 2017: N/A 2018: 36.6% 2019: 53.8% Sysadmin/Devops: 2017: 22.4% 2018: 36.5% 2019: 55.2% Of particular note, in 2019, VSCode is actually more popular than Vim among sysadmin/devops, and is a mere 0.4% less popular than Android Studio among mobile developers. It seems like it's mostly been gobbling market from its competitors: Sublime Text (peak of 31.0% in 2016 down to 23.4% in 2019) and Atom (peak of 20.0% in Web in 2017 down to 12.7% in 2019), although its possible their decline is circumstantial.
longstation 8y ago
Just curious, for the salary section, could someone explain why the salary for frontend role is lower the full stack role which is then lower than the backend role? I personally really like doing front end (Vue/React etc) work but when I saw this salary gap, I feel like that I need to reconsider my career path.
- binarytox1n 8y ago
  This is likely because more front end developers are younger/less experienced. While more expensive/older developers prefer backend work and are compensated more highly because of their experience.
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  - longstation 8y ago
    Is there any reason older/more senior developer prefers backend than full stack or front end?
    - brianpgordon 8y ago
      My gueses: * Frontend engineering is a newer discipline than backend engineering. * Frontend engineering is the first thing you run into as a kid. You interact with technology through the web browser. I learned HTML 4 when I was 11 because I wanted to make web pages. It wasn't until much later that I moved to backend engineering. It's just not as visible.
SomethingStars 8y ago
Where is Salesforce? It was consistently ranking high on "Dreaded" platforms but seems to be gone altogether this year.
thomzi12 7y ago
That's really interesting to see more Latinx developers (7.3%) than East Asian developers (5.3%) as a proportion of all professional developers. It's an awesome surprise, but is there a measurement reason for this? Unfortunately, this doesn't match my experience working in tech in the Bay.

235 points by joaomoreno 8y ago

bbsimonbb 8y ago

70 percent of male developers rate themselves as above average. 50 percent of women do. Dunning Kruger anyone ?

Pfhreak 8y ago
The competence vs years graph is interesting to me because over time things converge, but women and non-binary folks are significantly less confident in the early/mid career.
manfredo 8y ago
Not necessarily. Women on average reported less experience than men. This would mean we would expect the opposite self-ratings if the Dunning-Kruger effect was at play.
- lalaithion 8y ago
  The question asked for responses to be normalized based on experience level.
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I seem to remember reading about similar results when people were asked if they are above average drivers.
Chris2048 8y ago
Not only are there issues of subjectivity, such as DK effect, the survey itself also has selection bias, so there is no average ground-truth to compare against.

andy_adams 8y ago

Can someone help this old (2^5 years) developer out? I've worked with a number of programming languages over the years, and have never found a combination that brings me such joy and productivity as Ruby and Rails. However, I've always felt that Python and Ruby were very similar in style & goal. Can someone who is experienced in both Rails & Django explain why Python & Django are trending up so quickly, while Ruby & Rails are ranking on the "most dreaded" lists? I don't want this to become a holy war, I am just genuinely curious what I'm overlooking.

JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
Whilst I'm pretty heavily experienced in Rails I'm less-so in Django. If I had to guess Rails being dreaded is down to experienced Rails veterans wanting to move onto the new hotness, and the rise of Python / Django being simply down to the fact that people newly getting into web development are far more likely to know Python than Ruby.
WrtCdEvrydy 8y ago
Rails' power came from the gems, once the development shifts from there, Rails became a problem to maintain. I'm liking React more now since you get the full power (and clusterfuck) of npm.
- thrownaway954 8y ago
  Rails 5 has webpacker embedded, you can use npm packages in your projects.
hodder 8y ago
Django is likely rising because Python is rising. Most people are learning Python as their first language, and Django is a logical tool for them to try to build web apps.
- deleted 8y ago
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- 8y ago

maze-le 8y ago

Wow, jQuery is still one of the most popular web frameworks. That was unexpected...

rooam-dev 8y ago
I didn't know it's a web framework.
JoelTheSuperior 8y ago
To be honest it doesn't surprise me hugely. Whilst jQuery is hardly the best choice these days the simple fact is that such a ridiculous amount of libraries and plugins use it that it's sort of hard to avoid it. Don't get me wrong - I completely understand why you wouldn't want to use it if you can help it, but honestly, for many uses it's still not a bad choice in my honest opinion.
andy_adams 8y ago
I think the questions are formulated as such: "What web framework(s) do you use?", and respondents can pick as many as they want. That would explain the popularity: It's hard for me to think of a website I've touched that doesn't use jQuery, even if only for a small part.
H1Supreme 8y ago
I'm working on a local government site at the moment. I have 5 different tabs open for reference. 5 out of 5 are importing a jQuery library. Considering it's age and integration with Bootstrap (among others), it's not that surprising.
losthobbies 8y ago
It’s also one of the most dreaded?!
- Izkata 8y ago
  It has a reputation for spaghetti code. Just as it's the simplest to reach for, it's the simplest to hack something together with, with no thought to overall structure.

the_arun 8y ago

When we say percentage - the numbers are not adding up to 100. How are we supposed to read this report?

trymas 8y ago
Multi answer questions in the survey may explain that?
- the_arun 8y ago
  I see. One way of calculating % in multiple choice is ((total No. of C likers)/ total count of answers) * 100 to get % of popularity of C.
  - fxfan 8y ago
    You can just add all the percentages and divide by that number and you'll get the number you're talking about.
andy_adams 8y ago
Respondents are allowed to choose multiple answers for each question, so the totals != 100%.
Pfhreak 8y ago
Typically this indicates a multiple choice question, e.g. Choose the languages you are comfortable programming in. Then the percentage indicates the number of respondents who selected that / the total number of responses.

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strictnein 8y ago

> "almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly." Not at all. It's a self selecting survey, the people who choose to answer are likely more confident in their abilities than those that don't, and, contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average. Average != median

Allower 8y ago
Dunning-Kruger effect is still a thing unsurprisingly
marcosdumay 8y ago
> Average != median Unless given an explicit definition, the word "average" has been abused to an extent that it's currently meaningless.
piaste 8y ago
> contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average. Average != median For this kind of question ('is X above/below average?'), however, I would expect that people are _actually_ thinking of the median. Consider a high Gini-coefficient country, where the income distribution looks like this: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 999999. If you ask people 'is the person earning 5 above or below average?' they will say he is above average, even though he is actually above the median and below the average.
marvin 8y ago
Plus: There are so many aspects of software engineering that 70% can easily be above average (or the median) in at least one of them. It's like asking drivers if they're better or worse than average. The skill hasn't been defined with a clear metric. It's lazy to just pin this on dishonesty or hubris on the part of the respondents.
wainstead 8y ago
> It's a self selecting survey I feel like I have to point this out every year, and it's one of the most important things to keep in mind about this survey. A true survey would randomly select developers from the global developer population at large.

SolaceQuantum 8y ago

"Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem." Interesting. Isn't the former a subset of the latter?

Pfhreak 8y ago
non-development work is a subset of toxic work environments? No. I don't think so. Depends on how you identify development work. Is documentation, test-writing, requirements gathering, planning, backlog grooming, educating, or advocating considered non-development work? (I think all that stuff pretty clearly falls under the purview of 'developer', but I've gotten a lot of feedback from folks over the years who think it's not.) Toxic work environment can include things like sexual harassment, micro and macro aggressions, offensive language (I had a manager for a while who called his reports 'motherfuckers), etc. I wouldn't normally consider non-development work to be 'toxic' in the same way I'd consider, say, working with someone who consistently talks down to women and minorities.
- ThorinJacobs 8y ago
  To add onto your comment - I'd also consider a work environment that automatically assigns the documentation, test-writing, etc. to a gender minority (or other minority) to be toxic.
sidlls 8y ago
No. Software development for any non-trivial project requires more than just slapping a few requirements down on paper and then flinging code into an editor.
bluGill 8y ago
No, there is some overlap, but most non-development tasks are not really toxic, just overhead. I have to interview other developers. This is not a part of a toxic work environment (in fact it can prevent them). Toxic work environment be entirely development, for instance if they put your computer in the bathroom I'd call that toxic. I suspect most females mean some form of sexual harassment is tolerated. This is a big problem that men tend to culturally ignore.

headalgorithm 8y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19614674 for more discussion

umvi 8y ago

> We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly. I'm torn here. It's hard to correct for bias. It would be like if a bank had a survey and had people rate their financial stability - but they had to have an account with the bank to participate in the survey. Wouldn't that bias the results in favor of financially responsible people? I'd be interested how many 0 rep new accounts with lots of downvotes claimed high competence vs. established accounts. It could very well be that people with SO accounts who are willing to take the time for SO's survey are the type of people that are more competent on average than developers that don't have SO accounts and don't participate in surveys.

hnarn 8y ago
You have a point. It's not hard to imagine that actually using SO in the first place might correlate to you being an above average developer (among all developers).
- Semaphor 8y ago
  While I neither disagree nor agree, I've heard people claim the opposite: That people on SO are generally below average.
  - commandlinefan 8y ago
    Well, maybe the people asking questions are below and the people answering them are above.
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kyoob 8y ago

Odd that Perl isn't mentioned anywhere, good or bad, in these results. It's usually at least in there among the Most Dreaded. Was it not listed as an option this year?

kbenson 8y ago
From the methodology section: We used data from last year’s survey and trends in tags on Stack Overflow to identify which technologies to include on the survey this year. We prioritized popular and fast growing technologies, considering which smaller or shrinking technologies we could remove this year. So, I think it possibly wasn't listed as an option. Something to consider next time one of these reports is cited as evidence for or against something, as editorial discretion may or may not wildly change the meaning of the less popular items. In this case it may have been the difference between an item being included but lowly ranked and not included at all, which without additional information implies it didn't rank enough to be shown, but I'm not sure if that's the case or not (but I have my doubts that WebAssembly outranks Perl).
59nadir 8y ago
As far as I can remember it wasn't available as an option, no. Nor was Haskell, Common Lisp and a host of other languages.

claudiulodro 8y ago

Interesting that WordPress is the most dreaded tech every single year for the last 3+ years, yet WP "market share" is increasing every single year (it's now powering 1/3 of the web). Is it a disconnect between developers and non-developers? Is it just that developers don't like to work on "boring" tech, and working on WP is not a super-great resume builder? Curious to hear what people think.

andy_adams 8y ago
Having built lots of WordPress sites over the years, I can give you 2 strong reasons why it continues to grow, despite being disliked by software engineers: 1. There is no easier way to set up a standard marketing/business website, despite many quality attempts to build replacements. The plugin library is a big part of this. 2. It's extremely easy for anyone to start hacking on, leading to lots of developers "cutting their teeth" on WordPress by following online tutorials. Show me a self-taught front-end developer and I'll be shocked if they didn't learn on a WordPress site. This has good & bad aspects, of course.
marcosdumay 8y ago
It's horrible to work with, but it pays the bills, so people work with it. It's a testament to how being non-technical friendly leads to market success.
user5994461 8y ago
Wordpress sites are easily done without any development work. There are many platforms providing ready to use wordpress sites, with nice themes and common needs covered. It is not targeted toward developers at all. Comparing wordpress and developers, is a bit like comparing how many people like tyres (everybody got some on their car) to how many people enjoy making tyres for a living (not a very common activity).
- claudiulodro 8y ago
  That makes sense. Good analogy!

atonse 8y ago

Kudos to the Visual Studio Code team for all its success. VS Code and TypeScript, are kinds of technologies and tools that just win entirely on their strong merit, in spite the image of who has created them. .NET Core is getting up there too. MS has always been a developer friendly company but they are definitely earning mindshare back from non .NET developers.

strikelaserclaw 8y ago
Microsoft seems to be killing it lately.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  They're killing usability, [1] user control [2] and eBooks [3], I'll give you that. Soon they'll even be killing innocent civilians. [4] [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-new-study-shows-home-edition-users-are-baffled-by-updates/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-new-study-shows-hom... [2] https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-firefox-chrome-installation-on-windows-10/ https://www.ghacks.net/2018/09/12/microsoft-intercepting-fir... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47810367 [4] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/nadella-microsoft-will-sell-war-tech-to-democracies-to-protect-freedoms/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/02/nadella-microsoft-wi...

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mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Bittersweet to see how much “distracting work environment” is reported to reduce productivity, given that companies abjectly refuse to provide private & quiet workspaces despite it being unequivocally cost effective to do so even for most start-ups in dense urban centers. I continue to find the discussion of salary disappointing though. The survey provides a good opportunity for more detailed information.

umvi 8y ago
I personally find non-private settings where you can easily collaborate with other developers more productive. When I am alone in an office, there is a higher temptation to waste time on reddit/youtube and I am less likely to talk to other developers outside of IM apps. But when I'm in an open office/lab environment I find I'm more likely to stay on task and also more likely to get unstuck on something thanks to close proximity to other developers. Everyone is different.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  You occupy such an extreme minority among knowledge workers that, as a matter of default policy, your view has to be discounted in favor of privacy and quiet conditions. However, it’s easy enough for employers to provide both private & quiet offices and separate areas for constant collaboration and ambient chatter, allowing people to choose which type of area they want their primary workspace to be located in.
  - umvi 8y ago
    > However, it’s easy enough for employers to provide both private & quiet offices and separate areas for constant collaboration and ambient chatter To clarify: this is my situation. I have an office and an open lab in which to work. Usually I eat lunch in my office but find myself working in the lab most of the day because of the perceived increased productivity

Pfhreak 8y ago

I'm a non-binary manager who was formerly a non-binary engineer. I use singular they. I've had people go out of their way to make my professional life more challenging or insulting. But it makes me happy to see nonbinary/nonconforming identities addressed in this survey. Our experience of the tech world is very different, and it's great to see some acknowledgment of that.

Dumblydorr 8y ago
What is non binary? I haven't heard that before. Can you share some experiences?
- faitswulff 8y ago
  You should search for the term + "gender", but the long and short of it is that certain folks don't feel particularly compelled to identify as "male" OR "female" and thus identify as a non-binary (!(M|F)) gender.
  - mmmeff 8y ago
    Honest question: what does this have to do with software development?
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - Pfhreak 8y ago
      Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women. So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns. And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.

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ChrisRR 8y ago

As with every year, take these result with a massive pinch of salt. The results are heavily weighted by students and young developers who are way more likely to chase the latest trends and buzzwords

fj39dkf 8y ago
The survey provides specific numbers on this, no need for the pinch of salt: 41% of respondents have fewer than 5 years of professional experience, and 68% have fewer than 10. A better question is whether or not this experience distribution is representative of all software engineers. It almost certainly isn't, because it's only surveying "people who respond to stack overflow surveys", but it's hard to know how different it is. All that said, there is no need for the quip about trends and buzzwords. Of course younger developers are more interested in new technologies - they have a whole future career they need to plan for. One might just as easily and meanly say that old developers refuse to learn new things because they're just going to retire in 10 years.
- ChrisRR 8y ago
  I know they're stated, that's where I got the info from! Unfortunately every year people start taking the results from these and jumping to conclusions, like practically everyone is a full-stack, Node JS developer who contributes to open source 7 days a week. We know that's not true but it doesn't stop article after article every year claiming things like that.

bad_good_guy 8y ago

I actually found this to be the most interesting excerpt from the survey results >In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they deal with a mental health challenge, a higher proportion than other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany, or India. I would be interested to know just how much a higher proportion it was than other countries.

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measure2xcut1x 8y ago

As a solo indie developer running my own saas business for 20+ years now, and rarely interacting with other devs, this survey is priceless. I often wonder where I and my stack/tools are in relation to the rest of the field. This report (even if it is biased or skewed) makes me feel like I'm not alone and gives me some validation on my life path and technology choices.

leowoo91 8y ago
"He who lives by the crystal ball soon learns to eat ground glass" - Edgar Fiedler
astura 8y ago
I wouldn't put any stake in this survey as any sort of representation of the field in any way whatsoever. The people with SO accounts who even are even aware that SO is conducting a survey is so self-selecting that its in zero way any sort of representation of the industry as a whole. For example, in SO's survey 80% of respondents say they code as a hobby. If this survey was not self selecting I'd bet the farm that it would be the reverse - 80% didn't code as a hobby.
- saghm 8y ago
  Is "coding as a hobby" intended to be mutually exclusive with "coding professionally"? If not, I don't think I'd be that surprised by the 80% number even if it came from a source that everyone agreed was statistically significant.
jaabe 8y ago
I think it’s more interesting that if I load up a job-index site or search for techs on linked in, you get a significantly different picture of what is actually “wanted”. Maybe that’s from being Scandinavian but 90% of our jobmarket is still .Net framework (not core), JAVA and PHP.

vturner 8y ago

Curious about the salaries for the top four paying technology languages. Three of the four for US are functional focused languages, and for global all four are functional focused. As someone learning Scala, this is both encouraging and interesting, and I'm curious as to any explanation to the table result. Do functional programming languages increase developer productivity so significantly that a single developer can command such compensation? Do these languages attract highly productive developers whom the market compensates for their productivity? Something else?

666lumberjack 8y ago
I would imagine it's partly a reflection of the classic Python paradox. Developers who'll go out of their way to learn a new language and paradigm before it's mainstream are more likely to be highly talented. Companies that are using less popular languages rather than sticking with the default are more likely to take hiring high quality engineers seriously and pay them well.
mook 8y ago
Alternative possibility (that I just made up on the spot): the people who get to choose what language to work in, ignoring the popularity of the language (and therefore how easy they are to replace) are already in very senior positions. More junior people do not get the opportunity to work in functional languages.
- user5994461 8y ago
  It's half of that. On the chart "Salary and Experience by Language", people doing functional languages have much more experience. The other half is location. There are only few functional programming jobs, highly skewed toward the big cities with higher salary and costs of living.
tormeh 8y ago
Scala is the language for big data. It's also used in minor roles for hardware synthesis, finance etc., but big data is where it dominates other languages. Big data pays well.

geodel 8y ago

So Scala is among most dreaded right below Java at 41.7%. Considering in popularity it's quite low at 3.8%, it seem surprising to me.

commandlinefan 8y ago
I'm glad to see it isn't just me.

Abishek_Muthian 8y ago

Gone are the days when developers defined their job as 'X-programmer'(X being the language) or at-least in India as platform e.g Java platform. Companies have realised that programming languages are like 'drill bit in a tool box', one needs to use the best bit for the job.

purity_resigns 8y ago
The only folks I ever here say "the right tool for the job" are Java devs. /s In all seriousness, people using non-mainstream languages are very attached to them. At least in my sample size of one.

ksec 8y ago

1. I don't quite understand why people love Rust. I have nothing against it but I just don't quite get why the love. I viewed it as Modern C++ with Memory Management done right from Engineering perspective and elegant syntax with package management done right from the beginning. And may be just my circle or reading list, many Rubyist jumped to Rust, and more often after trying a few times and clicked, they felt in love with it. 2. Ruby = Rails. ~8.5% of Ruby Developers and there are 8.2% of Rails Developers. 3. Ruby / Rails are for many years split in love and dreaded languages and framework. ~50% on both side. I don't see any other languages and framework has similar pattern. 4. There are more Django / Laravel developers than Ruby Rails. 5. ~60% of Developers are on Windows. That was obvious right? And yet Ruby / Rails Community has ignore the Windows as a development platform for years. [1] My guess it is the lack of resources. 6. Speaking of Resources, Ruby is the top programming language that is surviving without a Major Cooperation ( Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple ) backing. 7. Ruby 's Median salary, comparatively speaking is trending on the higher side. And also one of the highest with respective of lower years of experience. That is both good and bad. Developers get higher salary, but less company are willing to choose it for cost reason. 8. Am I correct to assume those Salaries exclude any Stock grant? Which is common in US? 9. Visual Studio Code really is taking over, and there are more performance improvement coming. [2] I wonder if they would consider moving to WASM in the future. 10. Financial and banking - 8.9%, are the third in respondent's industry. I am a little surprise how many people are working in that field. 11. 60% of them prefer to work in office . THAT is great to hear. Not every one likes working from home or Remote. May be those who prefer to work from home are just very vocal about it. 12. And it is for that reason 80% of them prefer to have a Face to Face conversation. As easy as it is to type, write, calling or even Video conference, I still believe there is something when two people sit together and communicate. There is something that goes far beyond words coming out. [1] https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-windows-for-6-years-while-developing-discourse https://samsaffron.com/archive/2019/03/31/why-i-stuck-with-w... [2] https://twitter.com/kaimaetzel/status/1114908539342864384?s=20 https://twitter.com/kaimaetzel/status/1114908539342864384?s=...

manaskarekar 8y ago
> I viewed it as Modern C++ with Memory Management done right from Engineering perspective and elegant syntax with package management done right from the beginning That is a big deal in and of itself.

Dumblydorr 8y ago

Can someone explain why rust is so beloved? Also I work in R primarily, I find it funny that love and dread are both near 50%.

mmmeff 8y ago
I just started working through a textbook to learn Rust, coming from a heavy Typescript/Node background. It's too soon to say whether or not I'm in love but I already really like the approach to lower level programming with modern development perks like linting (RLS), package management (Cargo), simple build scripts (Cargo again). Comparing it to NPM+Node, there's a lot to like. I'm really looking forward to learning more.
- Takizawa 8y ago
  Rust has an elegant concept in its ownership paradigm. As the Rust book mentions: Ownership is Rust’s most unique feature, and it enables Rust to make memory safety guarantees without needing a garbage collector. In other words, you have the power/speed of a low level language without certain of the dangers, such as "double free" errors. (That said, I'm only now proceeding through the official book. In other words, if I got this wrong, someone correct me.)
bad_good_guy 8y ago
Disclaimer: This is personal observation. Fetishization of low-level languages by primarily Javascript developers, plus it has the same socially liberal online community that Javascript has, due to Mozilla. I hope this comment doesn't portray any bias.
- fj39dkf 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by "socially liberal"? Which language communities are on the other side of the spectrum?
alkonaut 8y ago
For me: because the languages that it is supposed to replace ie the C-style curly brace Lang’s in the systems/low-level/backend niches are all pretty bad. And a lot of us have used them for a decade or three so we are very aware of what’s bad. If you come from Java/C# and discover the speed of C without the pain of C, or if you come from C/C++ and notice life with decent compiler messages, a nice package manager, sane modules etc. - that’s a fantastic feeling.

ivm 8y ago

Top highlights: > 11% of our respondents said they didn't want to communicate with their fellow human beings via either method [face-to-face conversations or online chat] and > The aspects of Stack Overflow that respondents would like to change exhibit differences across demographic groups. For example, developers who are men are more likely to want change in official site rules (from the algorithms behind them to how they are enforced), while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site. The top words used by women to describe SO's problems include "condescending", "rude", "assholes".

iLemming 8y ago

Clojure did it again. Most paid language.

ilikehurdles 8y ago
And pretty well loved too! Now if only we could figure out how to get it up from the bottom of “most wanted” language.

jedberg 8y ago

> Do Developers Need to Become Managers to Make More Money? 50% said no. I think this is naive. We've had this discussion on HN before. Companies pay lip service to the idea that they have parallel tracks for management and engineering, but the reality of it is that it takes far more success to move up the engineering ladder. You can be one of the very best engineers in your company, or one of many hundreds of senior managers, and make the same money. If you look at how many people are at each salary level, the higher you go, the worse the ratio gets of management to engineer. If you want to get to the highest levels of the engineering ladder, you have to be one of the most well known engineers in the world. Or be a VP. It's not easy to be a VP, but there are far more VPs out there than Distinguished Engineers.

scottbreyfogle 8y ago
I think this is an example of developers taking questions quite literally: You don't need to become a manager, but many (myself included) would admit that it does help. You also might want to take into account the age and seniority of most developers on the platform - for someone with <10 years of experience, it's likely that you absolutely have an avenue to make more money without becoming a manager.
- jedberg 8y ago
  That is fair. For many of the young developers who responded to the survey, they probably have a ways to go before they start hitting compensation walls.
MrTonyD 8y ago
Another aspect is autonomy. It is routine in most companies for a low level incompetent manager to be able to waste all the time and talent of a senior engineer. So the issue is more than just money.
l9k 8y ago
This also depends on the country and its work culture. For instance, a senior engineer can be valued and respected internally, and paid accordingly in the US. In a country like France, where technical talent means little (except for very rare and niche skills), engineers usually transition early to managing positions if they can.

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codeforester 8y ago

Is anyone surprised seeing Bash/shell scripting being so popular? In my experience, I have seen very few people taking Bash scripting seriously. And it is frowned upon in tech interviews.

davemp 8y ago
Shell scripting just comes with the turf wrt Linux. Even just editing your `.bashrc` can technically be considered scripting. Elsewhere in the survey ~50% of devs claimed to used Linux, so it doesn't seem unreasonable.

b3b0p 8y ago

Regarding the most dreaded languages, 3 (C, Objective-C, Assembly) of the top 4 probably my favorites actually. I find working with and developing in C (Objective-C in iOS/macOS) and doing assembly the most fun I have had and look forward to. Maybe it's because right now I only do it for hobby. What makes it the most dreaded? My only guess is having to maintain legacy code that's hard to understand or poorly written or another valid reason. I'd love to get into an embedded C / assembly role. I got pulled into web development early on, but I had a friend who was stubborn and held out and ended up coding games for casinos in C/C++ in Linux and SDL. I'm so jealous.

insomniacity 8y ago

Can anyone enlighten me as to why Heroku is the number 3 most dreaded platform (behind Wordpress and IBM Cloud/Watson)? From my hobbyist exposure it's pretty awesome. I understand it's expensive for production... but why do people dread working on it?

fgonzag 8y ago
I would guess in absolute terms it must be dreaded by a lot of people simply because of it's extremely large user base. Any product is bound to rub someone the wrong way.
- insomniacity 8y ago
  Fair point, but it's not an absolute figure. % of developers who are developing with the language or technology but have not expressed interest in continuing to do so Heroku 47.3%

tuna-piano 8y ago

I think the most interesting portion was the "Developer's perspectives by gender". When asked what one thing they would change about Stack Overflow: Women used the following words more often (compared to men): condescending, replies, nicer, rude, dumb, friendlier, assholes, thanks, confusing, knowing. While men used the following words: simpler, huge, banned, angular, official, complex, algorithm, expert, bounty, force. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019&utm_content=launch-blog#community-_-developers-perspectives-by-gender https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019?utm_source=so...

montieferg 7y ago
fascinating

chillee 8y ago

VSCode has seriously dominated these lists since its release in 2016. Overall: 2016: 7.2% 2017: N/A 2018: 34.9% 2019: 50.7% Web: 2016: Unranked 2017: 24.0% 2018: 38.7% 2019: 55.6% Mobile: 2017: N/A 2018: 36.6% 2019: 53.8% Sysadmin/Devops: 2017: 22.4% 2018: 36.5% 2019: 55.2% Of particular note, in 2019, VSCode is actually more popular than Vim among sysadmin/devops, and is a mere 0.4% less popular than Android Studio among mobile developers. It seems like it's mostly been gobbling market from its competitors: Sublime Text (peak of 31.0% in 2016 down to 23.4% in 2019) and Atom (peak of 20.0% in Web in 2017 down to 12.7% in 2019), although its possible their decline is circumstantial.

longstation 8y ago

Just curious, for the salary section, could someone explain why the salary for frontend role is lower the full stack role which is then lower than the backend role? I personally really like doing front end (Vue/React etc) work but when I saw this salary gap, I feel like that I need to reconsider my career path.

binarytox1n 8y ago
This is likely because more front end developers are younger/less experienced. While more expensive/older developers prefer backend work and are compensated more highly because of their experience.
- deleted 8y ago
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- longstation 8y ago
  Is there any reason older/more senior developer prefers backend than full stack or front end?
  - brianpgordon 8y ago
    My gueses: * Frontend engineering is a newer discipline than backend engineering. * Frontend engineering is the first thing you run into as a kid. You interact with technology through the web browser. I learned HTML 4 when I was 11 because I wanted to make web pages. It wasn't until much later that I moved to backend engineering. It's just not as visible.

SomethingStars 8y ago

Where is Salesforce? It was consistently ranking high on "Dreaded" platforms but seems to be gone altogether this year.

thomzi12 7y ago

That's really interesting to see more Latinx developers (7.3%) than East Asian developers (5.3%) as a proportion of all professional developers. It's an awesome surprise, but is there a measurement reason for this? Unfortunately, this doesn't match my experience working in tech in the Bay.