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Stack Overflow Annual User Survey Results

33 points by rayvega 16y ago

rick_2047 16y ago
I don't use SO very much, but this poll looks interesting. The most interesting thing (not disclosed in the results) is what people wrote for "other (please specify)" in the question "13. Which languages are you proficient in?"
- NickPollard 16y ago
  I'm very surprised that C# rated so highly - maybe I'm out of touch - has it really gained that much traction? Which sectors is it focused in? Is it largely due it being pushed strongly by Microsoft, or are there other reasons for large takeup?
  - chrisaycock 16y ago
    Stack Overflow was created by a very Microsoft-oriented team.
  - sp332 16y ago
    I think Jon Skeet attracts them. http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet and (for fun) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts :-)
  - michaelbuckbee 16y ago
    The initial set of SO users were from the Joel on Software forums and from Coding Horror readers (neither of which were strictly Microsoft development sites, but both had audiences that skewed heavily in that direction). One of the simple genius things that SO did was deliberately not segregate the community into product silos: no C#overflow, RubyOverflow, etc. even though at the beginning there was a fairly vocal outcry from users for them to do so.
  - cpeterso 16y ago
    C# is also new "Visual Basic" for many internal corporate development projects.
- rquirk 16y ago
  The results were downloadable from the website if you took part. I copied the "other" column from the .xls file and here's a sort | uniq -c | head -21 of that table. 2188 people didn't mention other languages. 2188 55 Objective-C 40 Delphi 36 Java 24 VB.NET 19 VB 16 Haskell 14 vb.net 13 Objective C 12 Scala 11 ColdFusion 10 VB.Net 10 ActionScript 9 HTML 8 R 6 Lua 6 F# 5 vb 5 PowerShell 5 objective-c 5 Groovy There were a lot of "objective-c and some comment", so objective-c is even more popular. Other languages in there included: ocaml, assembly, klingon, tcl, fortran, COBOL, and quite a few matlabs. Here's the text file of that column for you to see for yourself http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub
yuvadam 16y ago
Actually what strikes me the most interesting is the fact that Stack's largest audience is still from the US. I would think that by now SO would see (much) more international traffic.
- wladimir 16y ago
  Well, it does get quite a lot of international traffic. For example, a lot of my colleages (here in the Netherlands) are using it. The site is very famous with programmers. I think that the uptake from the large, non-English countries is less because, for example, in my experience, Russians usually prefer Russian sites to ask their questions,
- _delirium 16y ago
  Well, the U.S. has the 2nd-most internet users after China, and there aren't many Chinese SO users, so I'm not surprised the U.S. ends up as the largest single country. If we compare some general internet-user stats by continent (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) to SO's respondents, we get: of internet % of SO Asia 42.0% 6.3% Europe 24.2% 37.8% US/Canada 13.5% 42.4% Latin America/Caribbean 10.4% 4.1% Africa 5.6% 1.5% Middle East 3.2% 2.6% Oceania/Australia 1.1% 5.0% The two biggest differences are: 1) Asians from countries other than India basically don't use SO; and 2) users from English-speaking countries use SO more than everyone else (there's between 3x and 5x more people from each of the US, UK, Australia, and Canada as their proportion of internet users).
praptak 16y ago
It seems that the survey was only announced on the stackoverflow blog (I am a SO regular and haven't noticed any news about it.) This might have skewed the results a bit. Update: I have found out they ran a banner on SO to promote it, so my concern becomes less valid. (Not totally invalid, advertising the survey on the blog might still have skewed the statistics towards people who read the SO blog, which might be a little different demographics than the general SO population.)
axod 16y ago
Question 14 is quite telling - 66%+ are using Windows :/ I'd think that the % here would be significantly less.
- Jem 16y ago
  I expected it to be less (and I'm a Windows user).
jasonkester 16y ago
I'm a little floored by the average compensation of StackOverflow users. 70% report being in the game more than 6 years, but only 5% are making more than $75/hr ($150k/year). I understand that the numbers are a bit skewed by people in countries with lower costs of living, but seriously, a developer in the 'states who can code his way out of a paper bag shouldn't be taking a job for $60k a year. Yet it looks like a lot of people are settling for them. Guys, you gotta stand up for yourselves.
- duffbeer703 16y ago
  I'm not surprised at all. The average staff programmer at a big corp isn't making much more than $50/hr. Programmers at small companies are usually making much less.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I'm not too surprised by 5% making more than $150k/year; there aren't that many $150k/year engineering jobs even in high-cost-of-living countries. Usually you have to move into management, start a business, or have a successful consulting gig if you want that kind of money. For example, the vast majority of Google engineers make under $150k: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=engineer http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm... Or, say, IBM engineers: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/IBM-Salaries-E354.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=engineer http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/IBM-Salaries-E354.htm?fil...
- tseabrooks 16y ago
  I think perhaps you are jaded by location? I can make that 150k a year in Cali, Seattle, and a few other popular locations... (I've been offered a few) but you've got to understand that the 75k a year folks are making in the middle of the country provides a very similar standard of living for the location that the 150k does elsewhere...
- cpeterso 16y ago
  Perhaps developers making $150K+ don't need to read SO (and vice versa)?
blasdel 16y ago
The selection of answers for #9 ("What is your involvement in purchasing?") were incredibly well formulated — one of the best survey questions I've ever seen.

33 points by rayvega 16y ago

rick_2047 16y ago

I don't use SO very much, but this poll looks interesting. The most interesting thing (not disclosed in the results) is what people wrote for "other (please specify)" in the question "13. Which languages are you proficient in?"

NickPollard 16y ago
I'm very surprised that C# rated so highly - maybe I'm out of touch - has it really gained that much traction? Which sectors is it focused in? Is it largely due it being pushed strongly by Microsoft, or are there other reasons for large takeup?
- chrisaycock 16y ago
  Stack Overflow was created by a very Microsoft-oriented team.
- sp332 16y ago
  I think Jon Skeet attracts them. http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet and (for fun) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts :-)
- michaelbuckbee 16y ago
  The initial set of SO users were from the Joel on Software forums and from Coding Horror readers (neither of which were strictly Microsoft development sites, but both had audiences that skewed heavily in that direction). One of the simple genius things that SO did was deliberately not segregate the community into product silos: no C#overflow, RubyOverflow, etc. even though at the beginning there was a fairly vocal outcry from users for them to do so.
- cpeterso 16y ago
  C# is also new "Visual Basic" for many internal corporate development projects.
rquirk 16y ago
The results were downloadable from the website if you took part. I copied the "other" column from the .xls file and here's a sort | uniq -c | head -21 of that table. 2188 people didn't mention other languages. 2188 55 Objective-C 40 Delphi 36 Java 24 VB.NET 19 VB 16 Haskell 14 vb.net 13 Objective C 12 Scala 11 ColdFusion 10 VB.Net 10 ActionScript 9 HTML 8 R 6 Lua 6 F# 5 vb 5 PowerShell 5 objective-c 5 Groovy There were a lot of "objective-c and some comment", so objective-c is even more popular. Other languages in there included: ocaml, assembly, klingon, tcl, fortran, COBOL, and quite a few matlabs. Here's the text file of that column for you to see for yourself http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub http://pastebin.com/wMZUBMub

yuvadam 16y ago

Actually what strikes me the most interesting is the fact that Stack's largest audience is still from the US. I would think that by now SO would see (much) more international traffic.

wladimir 16y ago
Well, it does get quite a lot of international traffic. For example, a lot of my colleages (here in the Netherlands) are using it. The site is very famous with programmers. I think that the uptake from the large, non-English countries is less because, for example, in my experience, Russians usually prefer Russian sites to ask their questions,
_delirium 16y ago
Well, the U.S. has the 2nd-most internet users after China, and there aren't many Chinese SO users, so I'm not surprised the U.S. ends up as the largest single country. If we compare some general internet-user stats by continent (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) to SO's respondents, we get: of internet % of SO Asia 42.0% 6.3% Europe 24.2% 37.8% US/Canada 13.5% 42.4% Latin America/Caribbean 10.4% 4.1% Africa 5.6% 1.5% Middle East 3.2% 2.6% Oceania/Australia 1.1% 5.0% The two biggest differences are: 1) Asians from countries other than India basically don't use SO; and 2) users from English-speaking countries use SO more than everyone else (there's between 3x and 5x more people from each of the US, UK, Australia, and Canada as their proportion of internet users).

praptak 16y ago

It seems that the survey was only announced on the stackoverflow blog (I am a SO regular and haven't noticed any news about it.) This might have skewed the results a bit. Update: I have found out they ran a banner on SO to promote it, so my concern becomes less valid. (Not totally invalid, advertising the survey on the blog might still have skewed the statistics towards people who read the SO blog, which might be a little different demographics than the general SO population.)

axod 16y ago

Question 14 is quite telling - 66%+ are using Windows :/ I'd think that the % here would be significantly less.

Jem 16y ago
I expected it to be less (and I'm a Windows user).

jasonkester 16y ago

I'm a little floored by the average compensation of StackOverflow users. 70% report being in the game more than 6 years, but only 5% are making more than $75/hr ($150k/year). I understand that the numbers are a bit skewed by people in countries with lower costs of living, but seriously, a developer in the 'states who can code his way out of a paper bag shouldn't be taking a job for $60k a year. Yet it looks like a lot of people are settling for them. Guys, you gotta stand up for yourselves.

duffbeer703 16y ago
I'm not surprised at all. The average staff programmer at a big corp isn't making much more than $50/hr. Programmers at small companies are usually making much less.
_delirium 16y ago
I'm not too surprised by 5% making more than $150k/year; there aren't that many $150k/year engineering jobs even in high-cost-of-living countries. Usually you have to move into management, start a business, or have a successful consulting gig if you want that kind of money. For example, the vast majority of Google engineers make under $150k: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=engineer http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm... Or, say, IBM engineers: http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/IBM-Salaries-E354.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=engineer http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/IBM-Salaries-E354.htm?fil...
tseabrooks 16y ago
I think perhaps you are jaded by location? I can make that 150k a year in Cali, Seattle, and a few other popular locations... (I've been offered a few) but you've got to understand that the 75k a year folks are making in the middle of the country provides a very similar standard of living for the location that the 150k does elsewhere...
cpeterso 16y ago
Perhaps developers making $150K+ don't need to read SO (and vice versa)?

blasdel 16y ago

The selection of answers for #9 ("What is your involvement in purchasing?") were incredibly well formulated — one of the best survey questions I've ever seen.