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Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022

421 points by klez 4y ago

nomilk 4y ago
"Fully remote" is the most common work environment! Wasn't expecting that, even considering covid. I wonder if employers will pressure staff to return to the office (e.g. hybrid) and fully remote will lose that number 1 spot next year. Time will tell. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-work-environment https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-wor...
deleted 4y ago
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Xenoamorphous 4y ago
Race “European”?
- tacker2000 4y ago
  Found that interesting too. But i guess that has to do with the fact that if youre not in the US then the concept of “race” is different.
- nailer 4y ago
  Er yeah? 'White' isn't a race it's a skin color.
bluedino 4y ago
I'm kind of shocked at the small amount of developers with > 15 years experience (as well as the amount with 1-4 years) but I'm just betting it's more to do with the developers that are more likely to respond to the survey.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I assume you mean greater than 15 years, but my experience is that many of the programmers with 25+ years experience don't bother with things like Stack Exchange, especially if they're in a programming world that is "old and out of date" anyway.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  10 years post college experience and I didn’t even realize there was a developer survey to answer.
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  I guess either: A) The most senior programmers simply don't visit Stack Overflow that much B) The more senior you get, the less actual programming your work entails, and you again visit Stack Overflow. Or something similar.
jedberg 4y ago
It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. I absolutely hate it with a passion. It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones.
- mulmen 4y ago
  It's IRC without the headaches.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    I have the same complaint about IRC. :). I'm ok with both Slack and IRC for collaborating on an immediate problem, like an outage, but I hate having it just sit there as a way for someone to ping me any time.
    - mulmen 4y ago
      Sure but your complaint is about chat apps, not Slack specifically. For the people who "love" Slack it is just IRC but easier.
      - jedberg 4y ago
        That’s fair, but even between slack and IRC I much prefer IRC for real time collaboration and any chat app for one on on conversations. Slack threads are the worst thing to happen to IRC. Pick a modality. Is it a real time conversation or asynchronous threads? And then having one on one and group collaborations in the same place means both are done poorly. It also means the notifications for both get mixed together. I want to get notified when someone posts to a group in slack, and I also want to get notified when I have a direct message, but not at the same time.
        mulmen 4y ago
        I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.
mayormcheeseman 4y ago
I expected C#/dotnet to make a little more headway considering all of the work being done and released recently, plus the push to make it more cross-platform than it already is.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Microsoft usually has pretty good documentation. Maybe that lowers the need to use SO, which would lower the odds of those developers being active on SO. 28% is still pretty good compared to Java's 33%.
  - mayormcheeseman 4y ago
    Oh definitely, Microsoft docs are usually very well written. And you're right, those percentages look pretty good.
jarek83 4y ago
Salary part - I wonder if those results make much sense. I remember that question did not specify the currency and also the previous question to it was the country of origin, which could suggest to use your local currency. At least I was not sure what to put there.
jarek83 4y ago
I wonder if there might be a bias in lang/framework popularity results towards those that give more challenge to devs. Like the more problems you have with a tool the more often you go to SO and it makes it more likely to fill the survey.
prohobo 4y ago
I love that C++ developers only want to work with C++ and Python, while nearly everyone else is doing web stuff.
- a_e_k 4y ago
  1. It's a combination that hits the sweet spot for the "alternate hard and soft layers" architecture. 2. Python is quick to write for scripts, one-offs, and things that don't need to the performance of C++. 3. The ecosystem is fairly stable and low-drama. (Speaking as one of those C++ and Python devs.)
- TillE 4y ago
  This is hilarious because that's literally me. I use C++ professionally and where it's appropriate for hobby stuff, and Python for nearly everything else. Ok I also use C# for the parts of game development where Python is too slow / not well integrated, but C++ would be overkill. But web dev? No way. Trendy new languages? Meh.
- sharedptr 4y ago
  Same here, I just want to get work done and they both meet my needs for performant stuff and web stuff. I hear a lot of noise about rust but I still didn’t find motivation to commit to learn it
butterNaN 4y ago
I went through 'I need to learn a new language' phase a few weeks ago. I decided to go with Elixir because it seems fun (I have no Functional experience). However, I am seriously considering Rust, because it seems so universally loved. Maybe the grass is greener on the other side? I will definitely pick up Rust when I feel I am comfortable enough with Elixir. I primarily want to work with Distributed Systems, but It seems the best 'setup' is Elixir for Distribution logic and Rust for leaf-nodes-number-crunching logic.
- Taywee 4y ago
  I'd recommend Rust even if just because the available material for learning it is really good: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn https://www.rust-lang.org/learn I'm just recommending Rust in general, not over Elixir, because I've never used Elixir and have no experience in that area. Rust is a pretty easy language to love.
- lawn 4y ago
  Both Rust and Elixir are languages people generally love, and I too really like them both.
- kretaceous 4y ago
  I'll politely hijack this thread to ask for suggestions about what functional language to learn next. I have no functional experience apart from dealing with similar, toned down concepts in JavaScript. I was considering Clojure or Elixir depending on tooling, ecosystem, market worth and most importantly, what can it teach me. The reason I got inclined to Elixir was to learn Phoenix/LiveView. The reason for Clojure was it's very much adored here and it seems a good starting language for FP. Rust is in my list but maybe sometime later this year.
  - ducharmdev 4y ago
    While I like the functional aspects of Rust, not sure I would call it a functional language - still very much worth learning though. Maybe a slightly unconventional answer, but F# is quite nice. https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/
mayormcheeseman 4y ago
I really want to learn Rust, but I just don't have enough time in the day to commit to learning it if I'm not going to be able to find a job with it that doesn't involve blockchain or cryptocurrencies. Can anyone tell me how the general Rust job market looks for you guys outside of things like Indeed?
- bobnamob 4y ago
  If you can hold your nose and work for a hyperscaler there's plenty of rust work to go around.
- leafario2 4y ago
  Not a big job market for sure, but for example the car industry on Germany is ramping up quite a bit!
- mdtusz 4y ago
  I think it's a silent market at this point. The company I'm at is using it, and anecdotally, many other companies are as well in small greenfield projects, so I anticipate there will be growing demand for developers that know rust in coming years. The downside of this is that there will be a massive influx of people learning rust, similar to "the python problem". At the moment, most people that know rust are for the most part competent with it, but I fear that may change as the supply side increases.
jonteru 4y ago
Interesting results as always, but on the salary side I find it really hard to believe that on the executive level (C suite/VP) the median annual salary is just 6k bigger than that of engineering managers. I'd imagine not a lot of executives respond to this survey so that probably skews the results.
- StevenWaterman 4y ago
  A 3-person startup probably has a CEO, probably doesn't have an engineering manager
- wiseowise 4y ago
  > Interesting results as always, but on the salary side I find it really hard to believe that on the executive level (C suite/VP) the median annual salary is just 6k bigger than that of engineering managers. C suite/VP that receive salary that is substantially higher than engineering managers don't sit on StackOverflow.
kertoip_1 4y ago
I wish they asked more about remote working, e.g. "Do you work for a company that operates overseas?". I'm also curious how does those answers differ by country: which nationalities are most open to work remotely for foreign companies? Where do people from my country work when they work remotely abroad?
- crummy 4y ago
  I'd like to see a split between actual remote work status vs desired remote work status (e.g. are you hybrid but would prefer to be fully remote?)
TrackerFF 4y ago
Wonder if that Rust lust comes from Rust developers themselves - i.e, programmers that use Rust a lot in their spare time, and really want to use it in their work too.
- Macha 4y ago
  My understanding is this is the generally accepted theory for most of the highly "want to use" technologies. Likewise the least "want to use" technologies tend to be business-y type tools where people might be made to use them for the ease of other stakeholders, or integration with frameworks only used by e.g. legacy enterprise software.
Yuioup 4y ago
One web framework I expected to see trend downwards for professional developers is Angular, slowly being replaced by vue but my prediction did not seem to come true. Angular is steady while vue even trended downwards. The absolute king is React. Clearly professional developers are choosing to go for it because it looks like a safe bet.
- runarberg 4y ago
  They are also choosing it because that’s what they know, or that’s what the project lead picked. And the project lead might have picket it because it is a company policy or because their manager told them to pick what ever would have the most available talent, etc.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I like vue a lot for weird reasons, but it seems vue3 hit some roadblocks. The boxed refs are unpretty, and now they look like react-metoo product.
- blablabla123 4y ago
  I kind of want to like Angular since it's so nicely integrated. But working with it is clearly not fun...
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Angular got into Big Corporate, which ensures it'll last a while. Horrible thing.
- faizshah 4y ago
  Anecdotally, a lot of devs are picking React over vue at work simply because everyone else is picking React. I was kinda surprised Svelte didn’t even show up given that people are calling it the next in line. I guess React will be the new jquery for a while.
- WuxiFingerHold 4y ago
  The next gen frameworks like Svelte or SolidJS are much easier to use, still more powerful and way faster. I have no clue why people keep using the old ones. The argument that the old ones have larger ecosystems is true but not appropriate as integration of pure JS libs is very easy with both Svelte and SolidJS. I especially recommend people looking into SolidJS: https://www.solidjs.com/ https://www.solidjs.com/
politelemon 4y ago
> A Linux-based OS is more popular than macOS - speaking to the appeal of using open source software. I'm glad to see this, and I hope this trend can continue. Though I wish I worked for such a company, and I friendly-envy people who have such a privilege.
- zmxz 4y ago
  We have the freedom to choose between Windows/Linux/Mac Most frontend devs went with MacOS. All backend devs went with Linux. MacOS is the one that causes problems with containerization and virtualization. Addition: frontend devs use Safari. This comes with its own problems due to browser inconsistencies between platforms. TL;DR: we have a subset of devs who went with MacOS and there was no tangible gain. I'm not tribalist, I merely like things that work. Personally, I think Windows is the best looking UI but I use Linux for work - I'm devoid of personal preferences when it comes to getting things done. In my opinion, and this is by no means a fact - it's a mere opinion, Mac is a status symbol rather than productivity indicator.
  - arvinsim 4y ago
    Frontend developers go with MacOS because it's the only platform that allows them to test their sites in Safari.
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  I’d like to filter to United States and reassess. I don’t know anyone running Linux. It could be the case that only US developers can afford macs.
wiseowise 4y ago
Surprised at average Ocaml salary. But then Jane Street folks, probably, don't use platforms like StackOverflow.
- acchow 4y ago
  It's because Ocaml is from France and is taught in many schools in France. Europe overall has much lower salaries than the US.
gdsdfe 4y ago
Wait so in Canada a student is payed $116k+ more than a data scientist or a data engineer or a backend developer etc. ?!? How does that make any sense ?
_8j50 4y ago
Not gonna lie, I am a little upset about Ocaml here.
khoobid_shoma 4y ago
The numbers do not say what is really better. It just reflects responders' opinions.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  > It just reflects responders' opinions. That's why they called it a 'Developer Survey'.
whatever1 4y ago
How many web frameworks are people building per day? I built my last website in 2018 and I cannot recognize any of the top frameworks listed today by SO. Even worse the frameworks I knew are now at the bottom lol
- jstx1 4y ago
  I don't get what you mean - the top 3 frameworsk are Node, React and jQuery, the youngest of them (React) was released in 2013.
  - whatever1 4y ago
    According to SO top 3 most loved are: Svelte, phoenix, deno. I literally had to google them
ch4s3 4y ago
I'm excited to see that Elixir is the second most loved language in the survey, especially since most Elixir users don't engage with stack overflow.
ksec 4y ago
Ruby is missing entirely in the [1] Salary and experience by language. 156 People responded were programming with Crystal professionally. A language that is still very very young. Even ignoring Node.Js, there are 3x [2] more Django developers than Rails. If people thinks Phoenix is young or niche, it has half of Rails professional usage in this survey. Django's current position should be what Rails tries to achieve. 15% usage is enough for a market sustainable position. Some Google developer told me Fresh Grad or Junior Software Engineers gets $200K Total Comp per year. That is equal to the median salary of Senior Executive (C-Suite, VP, etc.) in the US. When developers with 5 - 10 years of experience are calling for a "fair" $400K Total Compensation on Twitter. Someone on HN once said Google Senior SWE make up to $700K. The salary gap within the industry is huge. [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... [2] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-web-frameworks-and-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t...
- bombcar 4y ago
  The gap is insane even between the FAANGs, someone got an offer at $450 total comp (inc grants over five years) at one and the other couldn't even break 225/yr total. Something is gonna have to give.
  - aiisjustanif 4y ago
    Is important to reflect on compensation gaps among top 10 companies in the US over time and the positions that they valued most (whether fair to value them that way or not). That will tell the story of if there is anything to give.
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    > Something is gonna have to give. Why? The work product of a senior engineer (on average) is worth some multiple of the TC or the company wouldn't be paying it. Tom Cruise makes way more than the director or the studio execs too. Because he sells tickets/rentals that make the movie more profitable. Same thing.
- 4y ago
TruthWillHurt 4y ago
There are more blind developers than non-binary ones. Perhaps we should add Braille to our business cards besides the he/him they/them descriptors.
crummy 4y ago
Delphi is #7 in the loved languages ranking? Kind of surprised to see that. Is this nostalgia or is it actually a great language?
- radicalriddler 4y ago
  Yup, at 65% I'm wondering whether most people are voting based on Object Pascal rather than the Delphi ecosystem. It is not a good ecosystem, but Object Pascal is quite enjoyable to work with (really makes you think about memory management).
- sakesun 4y ago
  It's the last in the most wanted list.
miffy900 4y ago
17% of learners report not using version control. I'm surprised that isn't higher TBH. But who are these 1.38% of professional developers who self-report that they do not use version control? Please rethink your life...
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Yes that was my same reaction when I read it. If you click on the #, there are around ~700 of them not using version control.
lawgimenez 4y ago
As a mobile developer (Swift and Kotlin) not sure how I feel about this survey. Or I'm glad that both are not that popular, less competition, etc.
- Gunnerhead 4y ago
  Same here. Also surprised about the salaries, I'm paid the same as my backend colleagues with similar YoE.
  - lawgimenez 4y ago
    Also the unpopularity of both Android Studio and Xcode. Which for me is overblown.
zwilliamson 4y ago
SREs reign supreme in Individual comp again.
pojzon 4y ago
IMHO being good at asking goopd questions when searching for solutions is a skill in itself and if done correctly -> can save you days of reading documentation or source code debugging (which both can often be very poor). So by Stackoverflow I “waste” few hours getting “less things done” my productivity is “worse” by gaining few days reducing time required for solving the issue. Scratching my head here.. Ps. Thr survay seems extremely biased by getting mostly JS developers / freelancers to respond. Enterprise world looks completely differently.
edumucelli 4y ago
"Chef developers are the highest paid but Chef is also the most dreaded other tool." maybe there is a correlation, they receiving a compensation to work on such tool?
ramcle 4y ago
Does anyone know why Salesforce is no longer included in the survey? It was included up till 2018 in "Platforms", but since then it's been strangely absent.
abhaynayar 4y ago
Good to see Security Professional as a Developer Type. I recall looking for it in previous surveys but couldn't find it.
emredu 4y ago
Highlights from the results: 1. Git Is the King: The Use of Git Is Increasing Year by Year 2. Version Control Universe: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps 3. Docker Usage Is Increasing Year by Year 4. Docker and Kubernetes Are in Every Developer’s Toolbox 5. Communication Matters: Developers Love Slack 6. You Probably Have Knowledge Silos As Productivity Killers 7. Smaller Organizations Often Tend to Be in the Office 8. Developer Experience: Processes, Tools, and Programs Within an Organization Read More: https://betterprogramming.pub/stack-overflow-2022-developer-survey-where-is-the-industry-heading-3cd4a0cd41f3 https://betterprogramming.pub/stack-overflow-2022-developer-...
fullstackchris 4y ago
Super late to the party but suprised how dreaded Gatsby is. I've been using it since its infancy and I've only seen improvements. I can consistently build sites with it that get a 100/100 score with Google's Lighthouse tool. Wonder if anyone could chime in if they ever see this.
arvinsim 4y ago
> 88% of Professional Developers code outside of work, with 73% of them coding as a hobby. This is what I am afraid of. It leads to an arms race where everyone now has to code outside of work to be competitive. As someone who values work-life balance, this is a worrying trend.
juice_bus 4y ago
(semi unrelated) Does anyone else find them selves using SO less and less as you gain more experience? I'm over 10 years now and rarely find my self on SO.
- jamil7 4y ago
  Yeah, more or less, I still do come back to it when I'm picking up a new language or framework.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Absolutely. Two of the big reasons are improved understanding and problem solving skills on my part and improvements in the tech stack I use day to day making things more clear and covering more use cases cleanly. The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound. As such when I use SO these days it’s usually not for wholesale solutions to problems but rather to add to a greater body of examples of APIs in action which I can then abstract and use as needed. It’s decent for this use case.
  - plonk 4y ago
    > The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound. The real clean answer is usually a mildly upvoted comment that scolds the answerer for violating a standard or using a bad practice. SO is still useful when that happens.
- stemlord 4y ago
  That would be great. I work in a generalist type of field where learning new tools is part of the job so I am still googling the same stupid questions almost every day
  - 4y ago
pxeger1 4y ago
Could the title be updated to include the word "Results"? When I saw this, I thought it was the survey itself (which has already happened, obviously)
billpg 4y ago
I answered "Very Favorable" to "How favorable are you about blockchain, crypto, and decentralization?" I am indeed very favorable indeed to decentralization. I also think blockchains are almost always a waste of electricity by computers pointlessly playing Numberwang all day. (I'm not quite sure if "almost" is needed there.)
- bitwize 4y ago
  "Pointlessly playing Numberwang all day" is the best, most accurate description of blockchain activity I've ever heard.
  - hannofcart 4y ago
    I was thinking the exact same thing. That comment deserves some kind of Hall of Fame status!
    - billpg 4y ago
      Thank you. If my comment does get into a hall of fame, please edit out the repeated "indeed".
- mercenario 4y ago
  > I also think blockchains are almost always a waste of electricity by computers pointlessly playing Numberwang all day. (I'm not quite sure if "almost" is needed there.) In relation to what? Do you have an alternative way of maintaining blockchains security?
- boardwaalk 4y ago
  I agree this is a very unfortunate grouping of topics. The irony is that there’s a lot of cryptocurrency stuff that isn’t even well decentralized, so it’s almost an objectively bad grouping.
treis 4y ago
(1) My poor back button (2) Those YoY salary increases are bonkers (3) Poor Ruby on Rails. Seems to be slowly sliding into irrelevance in the face of stiff competition.
- tra3 4y ago
  Rails is boring tech [0] now. Phoenix seems to top the "wanted" listed, but it only has about a ~1000 respondents. If I had to guess I'd say js/typescript will eventually eat rails, django etc. If I started coding today, or indeed within the last 10 years, it's not clear why I would choose anything other than Javascript. [0]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
  - faizshah 4y ago
    If you look at most loved languages, most wanted languages and most popular languages among both students and professionals Python and Typescript are the best choices for new stuff. Of the newer languages it seems Rust has the most momentum behind it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Been a Rails dev for my whole career and at this point my love for it is slowly sliding away. It’s the most amazing framework ever for the first few years but after the app starts to grow older and larger it becomes almost unworkable. It’s virtually impossible to update even the smallest gem and know you haven’t caused issues. A rails upgrade is impossible without 100% test coverage of everything and even then you have to cross your fingers that nothing slipped through. The current place I work at is investigating pulling things out of rails and in to a Rust macro service so we can have some confidence that changes actually work.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    The investigation out-withstanding, do you actually know of any also amazing framework that has been used for more than a few years (which I guess is already pretty long on average for web tech stuff) that performs better in this department? I wonder what we would even fairly compare Rails to. Django? Laravel is already quite a bit young but sure, why not. I guess finding someone who actually has deep, year long and equivalent experience on the candidates would be pretty hard.
andsoitis 4y ago
Of the ~52k responses: - almost 33% of people have programmed professionally for less than 4 years - just over 27% have programmed professionally between 5 and 9 years.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  I suspect junior developers care a lot more about Stack Overflow than more experienced developers. When I first started my career, I looked at SO at least daily. Now (10 years later), I look at it maybe monthly when I'm searching for a solution to a weird library/config issue. If that hunch is correct, it would explain why the data are so skewed towards people with less than 5 years of professional experience.
  - Washuu 4y ago
    30 years of coding experience here.(Professional + student) I only end up on Stack Overflow for cryptic regex stuff that I forgot and ffmpeg syntax.
  - DoingIsLearning 4y ago
    In my case I am not sure if it's just more experience or search engine degradation of the past 15 years. I used to search for solutions a lot more, nowadays, with the amount of content farming and spammy blog content, I feel a lot more averse to any search query at all. The threshold is raised such that I really need to be stuck to go online and I will usually end up in vendor forums at some endpoint.
NKosmatos 4y ago
When you see (once more) that despite your 20 years of experience you're being paid less that what students are being paid in other countries :-) (yes people, I know it's my fault that I'm still staying at this job... no need for downvotes or negative comments).
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  you are not alone
- anticristi 4y ago
  Depending on your geography, it might be a fair price to pay for universal healthcare, free daycare and university for your kids, as well as having a notion of evening and weekend. I'm still looking for a golden tool to convert total compensation plus geography into expected happiness.
  - mminer237 4y ago
    The average American pays 10% of his income on healthcare expenses. [1] That would mean it would be around $5,000/year. The US charges maybe $30,000 more for college than some cheaper countries. With two kids, that's maybe $1,500/year amortized over a career. Those aren't going to be worth it for the average person unless you live in Norway, Luxembourg, or the UAE. I doubt there's any country where those outweigh the average programmer salary difference, let alone after taxes. Even if you have a serious health condition and crappy health insurance, deductibles cap out at $7,000/year. [1]: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/05/02/health-care-costs https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/05/02/health-ca...
    - Gadiguibou 4y ago
      This feels a little reductive of the benefits that come from public education and healthcare. Developers making 300,000$ a year don't make up the entirety of the US population. I think living somewhere where everyone gets an opportunity at life contributes greatly to overall happiness and helps reduce social tensions. Good urban design, a nationalized electricity grid, or train system also contribute a lot to the disparity in taxes and salaries.
shagie 4y ago
Students claim to have 4.86 years (on average) of professional experience. O_o The lowest years of experience of actual professionals belongs to... blockchain developers with 9.63 years (on average) of professional experience.
- kiernanmcgowan 4y ago
  My guess is that there’s some sampling bias for the student population - if you’re plugged in enough to be doing this survey you’ve probably been hacking for a while. Fwiw, I started getting paid for slinging code at 16, maintained the website for a university group in college, while still doing other work in the summers. I probably would have answered with “6 years of experience” if asked when I graduated. Is that truly “professional experience”? In retrospect probably not, but 22yo me would have been too stubborn to answer otherwise.
  - tester756 4y ago
    Do you take hours ratio into the account? e.g if you've been working 4h a week, then it'd be weird to say after year that you have 1 year of commercial experience, when your colleagues spent 40 hours / week and have "only" 1 year too I believe that pay is not necessary, but working for somebody else or in team (e.g OSS) is necessary. So yea, I wouldn't say that hacking something even cool, but alone is commercial xp.
- tester756 4y ago
  I do have 4 years of commercial experience and I'll be getting masters next year. That's because I've been working full time since 2nd semester But I still do believe that it's weird. Maybe people think about experience in general instead of commercial, full time?
- kerblang 4y ago
  Just a note, the comment is quoting from this: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-years-of-professional-coding-experience-by-developer-type https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-yea... BTW many people go (back) to school after obtaining some professional experience. Not sure about the context of this part of the poll though.
davidspiess 4y ago
Is it possible to find out the average salary of a specific country? In the survey it's only possible to switch between US, India, Germany, UK and Canada.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  My union does that, you may have one for IT professionals where you live.
- pxeger1 4y ago
  I presume that's because they didn't have enough data for other countries.
mg 4y ago
Observations: 1: Amazing that Javascript is the most popular language, despite nobody has yet managed to write a fast FizzBuzz in it :) https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-throughput-fizz-buzz https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr... 2: SQL and Bash both went up a percentage point! Yay! The art of terse and efficient code is not yet dying. 3: Strange that "Web frameworks" mixes backend and frontend frameworks. Why is "node.js" listed here? Isn't node.js a runtime? 4: Docker made a big jump from 49% to 64%. I consider that a good thing. I don't believe in "containerizing" applications. But I prefer to have Docker stay around for the long term. Because containers on their own are so darn useful. 5: Git is at 94%! Really? 94% of developers use Git? Or do they use some tool that is using abstracting Git away, like GitHub? Anyhow. Thats great, because Git (like vim) is one of the best pieces of software out there and I love that it will be around for a very long time.
- bluedino 4y ago
  There is no way that 94% of programmers know how to use Git. Most of them barely know how to program.
- GlitchMr 4y ago
  > 1: Amazing that Javascript is the most popular language, despite nobody has yet managed to write a fast FizzBuzz in it :) The reason for that is that standard output implementation in Node.js is very slow. When the challenge is to write as fast as possible to standard output that's not ideal.
- silentguy 4y ago
  Regarding Git being 94%, if you see the table just below about interacting with the version control system, you'd see 83.57% users using command-line. 28.44% are using version control hosting service web GUI. 83.57% is still a big number of people who are using git with fewer abstractions on top.
- speedgoose 4y ago
  It’s because it’s not possible.
newaccount2021 4y ago
layer8 4y ago
They don’t seem to answer the most important question: Does using spaces over tabs still predict a higher salary?
- kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  Tabs, but only when set to three spaces.
- jve 4y ago
  I never understood the deal behind tabs vs spaces figths. Was it because of legacy editors or what? Editor now helps formatting code, even when pressing enter button, it aligns entry on new line.
  - layer8 4y ago
    For me, important differences are how the cursor behaves when moving around, and the effect of backspace. I like consistent movements, i.e. always one character position per keypress, and therefore prefer spaces.
- nailer 4y ago
  Real programmers indent with the corn emoji.
- ho_schi 4y ago
  I'm using tabs. Explains a lot...
viggity 4y ago
Is the raw data available?
- jesprenj 4y ago
  +1. The website is unusably slow for me.
yuy910616 4y ago
Udemy coming in at 66% is pretty surprising to me. I personally purchased some 50 courses on there, and am happy with the result (especially owning the course and not having to deal with a subscription), but it is surprising to me that it basically won that market. It isn't all that friendly to course maker iirc. And the course quality varies a lot. Its pricing model is also very shady, giving me the impression that it is a poorly run company. Of course - youtube is not included; I imagine that'll really skew the graph edit: shoot, I just checked and I actually purchased 98 courses.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  Yeah, though I thought Udemy had the least favorable reputation just because of the weird pricing tactics and a lot of courses being glorified tutorials. There's some great stuff on there, but I didn't think it would rank that much higher than Coursera.
TIPSIO 4y ago
Interesting as always. It would be great to have a UX to easily compare the trends, such as 2022 vs 2021 vs 2020 though. Unless I missed it. The "Web framework and technologies" section doesn't seem accurate to compare in a meaningful way. For example, they have Node.js as a standalone option probably throwing off everything. Then these compare weird when put together as options: Next, Nuxt, React, Vue, etc. Love it or hate it, jQuery was also #3.
- nailer 4y ago
  I wouldn't count 'node' as a framework but rather a JS implementation. Same way one counts 'ruby' or 'python'.
pier25 4y ago
Svelte is doing great in the loved/dreaded metric. First of all JS technologies. Second overall.
- gedy 4y ago
  I love Svelte and maintain some open source libraries for it, but in recent job search I was struck by a near total lack of jobs mentioning it being used.
  - pier25 4y ago
    I don't think it will ever get as big as React or jQuery, but once SvelteKit is released I expect it to grow much faster.
ctvo 4y ago
Surprising for me: AWS's market share is still Azure + GCP combined amongst professional developers [1]. With various articles about Microsoft's success I was expecting lower. The same for loved / dreaded. AWS scores significantly better [2] in terms of loved over other cloud platforms. Being in the HN bubble I was expecting that to be lower also. The other items that scored high on loved / dreaded were mostly new technologies vs. dominant incumbents. 1 - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-platform-prof https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog... 2 - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-platform-love-dread https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...
- npalli 4y ago
  Regarding Azure, it is quite possible the primary developers are corporate/in-house types and not big on responding to this particular survey. About 70,000 developers (in total) responded which is a small fraction of the developer universe.
  - isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
    And I believe microsoft counts their SaaS offerings in their Azure usage, which significantly skews the numbers.
  - swyx 4y ago
    always the same criticism with surveys. and yet this is one of the biggest surveys in the world. one has to try.
    - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
      Yes, and its quite likely correct. Possibly why it's often raised!
- clumsysmurf 4y ago
  As an Android developer since 2009, I will not touch anything from Google ever again. Its a very asymmetrical relationship, and if something goes wrong, like your account gets suspended, its a Kafkaesque nightmare, with usually no recourse.
Barrera 4y ago
> Clojure remains the highest-paid language to know. Any ideas around why that could be?
- caterwhal 4y ago
  I've been a professional Clojure developer for some time now. My main observation when it comes to this is that Clojure is often picked to solve particular problems based on the capabilities it offers over other languages very deliberately. I've seen quite a few cases where an organization had attempted to solve a really high value problem with a more mainstream language, realized that it was next to impossible to succeed that way, and then tried Clojure with great results. In short, oftentimes Clojure makes it easy to solve really difficult problems and expert Clojure developers are in short supply. Some examples of problems that I've seen Clojure excel in solving: 1. Complex rule modeling 2. Optimization systems 3. Big Data pipelines 4. Highly concurrent systems 5. Streaming systems
- yen223 4y ago
  My hypothesis is that Clojure doesn't get used outside of the US, and so the median salary isn't pulled down by the comparatively lower salaries outside of the US
  - askonomm 4y ago
    Tons of Clojure in Europe. Especially Northern Europe. Following the job boards and Clojurians Slack channel's #jobs channels I figure it's about 50/50 for US and EU.
    - redbar0n 4y ago
      Not that many Clojurians in Oslo (Norway), unfortunately. 121 members in the Meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/clojure-oslo/ https://www.meetup.com/clojure-oslo/ For comparison: Ruby - The meetup group of the tiny Ruby community (confirmed by experience) has 329 members: https://www.meetup.com/ruby-meetup-oslo/ https://www.meetup.com/ruby-meetup-oslo/ Imba - The meetup group of the niche full-stack web programming language Imba, has 134 members. https://www.meetup.com/imba-oslo-meetup/ https://www.meetup.com/imba-oslo-meetup/
pastor_bob 4y ago
As an aside, I find the search-ability of this presentation to be terrible. I tried looking for word with CMD+F and the section I was looking at completely disappeared!
- Aachen 4y ago
  I don't remember last years' but this was pretty mediocre indeed. E.g. after the first two graphs, I used autoscroll (middle click, move mouse) so that I 'saw' the whole page and all the graphs loaded and animations triggered. Then ctrl+up and read more comfortably. How stackoverflow builds this in when flashing content is such a common annoyance, I don't know. Sure, you don't want to load a megabyte of data for when people open the page for just 2 seconds, but there are animations on top of the lazy loading, the actual data is not that large anyway, and the loading distance is not hard to increase either.
- rurp 4y ago
  Breaking cmd+f functionality will immediately sour me on a site. It's surprising how many tech companies go out of their way to ruin basic behavior like that.
usrbinbash 4y ago
Docker going strong :-) Unsurprising, really. The usefulness of it cannot be overstated. Doesn't even matter if its used anywhere in the deployment chain; simply having the ability to pull up a replica of almost any *nix environment on my laptop in mere seconds, using it for tests, and then throwing it away resetting it again in mere seconds is beyond awesome, no matter if what I'm working on then goes into a huge complicated deployment chain, or is shoved onto some on-premises, zero-abstractions, baremetal server. And how is it all configured? Plain text files. How is it controlled? Command Line. Meaning I can script it every way I want, using the tools I already have and use. Doesn't get in the way, doesn't demand that I work around it...it works with me and my tools in the same way they already work together. Oh, and of course, good bye and good riddance to the days when I had to install and configure local RDMS for tests. Everything I use has an official image, so I just write some small setup script, a Dockerfile, knit everything together in a docker-compose.yml and presto, done: Application stack is up and running. To me, Docker is as essential as my text editor these days.
- _ZeD_ 4y ago
  > Unsurprising, really. The usefulness of it cannot be overstated. meh, I can count on my hand the times it was useful to me. oh, and having to deal with docker desktop is not fun
  - plonk 4y ago
    > oh, and having to deal with docker desktop is not fun To stay sane, just forget it exists until it crashes irretrievably, then reinstall it and repeat. Containers and images being disposable is the whole point anyway.
  - umvi 4y ago
    Well yeah, Docker + Windows isn't the best experience. I recommend WSL if you must go down that route.
    - GordonS 4y ago
      It used to be a bit flakey pre-WSL2 integration ~2-3 years back - it's been absolutely rock solid for me on Windows since then, just like on Linux.
throwaway889900 4y ago
People love APL more than Java? Interesting, I always bring up APL as a joke.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Only about 500 people filled in APL, whereas about 22k people filled in Java. For a lot of people APL isn't really on the radar.
- abrudz 4y ago
  Makes sense to me (but I'm of course biased) due to selection bias. My impression is that those for whom APL clicks, find the day-to-day APL experience very enjoyable, while those that just don't get it will tend to leave APL behind. Probably not so for more widely-used languages, where people will stay with them, even if it means daily frustration.
diarrhea 4y ago
I was under the impression Solidity was a dumpster fire language. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008. It ranks surprisingly high. Is this riding off of Ethereum’s popularity? Perhaps in combination with the skewed sample (towards young/beginning devs).
jedberg 4y ago
> A majority of respondents (75%) have been working for 14 or fewer years as a professional developer, meaning they’ve never worked in a world without Stack Overflow. Oh boy did this make me feel old.
- vgeek 4y ago
  The horrors of expertsexchange?
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Even worse -- the horrors of having to find a book in the library to answer your question. When I started working all the senior devs had full bookshelves of O'Reilly books, and if you got stuck you went to them to either ask a question or use their books. Then as they left the company, all of us would fight over who got ownership of the O'Reilly book collection!
    - systematical 4y ago
      This is how I learned and rounded out the edges with random forums.
ask_b123 4y ago
I always miss out on answering these surveys and only remember their existence when the results come out.

421 points by klez 4y ago

"Fully remote" is the most common work environment! Wasn't expecting that, even considering covid. I wonder if employers will pressure staff to return to the office (e.g. hybrid) and fully remote will lose that number 1 spot next year. Time will tell. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-work-environment https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-employment-wor...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Xenoamorphous 4y ago

Race “European”?

tacker2000 4y ago
Found that interesting too. But i guess that has to do with the fact that if youre not in the US then the concept of “race” is different.
nailer 4y ago
Er yeah? 'White' isn't a race it's a skin color.

bluedino 4y ago

I'm kind of shocked at the small amount of developers with > 15 years experience (as well as the amount with 1-4 years) but I'm just betting it's more to do with the developers that are more likely to respond to the survey.

bombcar 4y ago
I assume you mean greater than 15 years, but my experience is that many of the programmers with 25+ years experience don't bother with things like Stack Exchange, especially if they're in a programming world that is "old and out of date" anyway.
ilikehurdles 4y ago
10 years post college experience and I didn’t even realize there was a developer survey to answer.
TrackerFF 4y ago
I guess either: A) The most senior programmers simply don't visit Stack Overflow that much B) The more senior you get, the less actual programming your work entails, and you again visit Stack Overflow. Or something similar.

jedberg 4y ago

It blows my mind that 72% of developers love Slack. I absolutely hate it with a passion. It's like someone walking up to your desk, except we made it way easier because they don't have to get up and feel the social pressure of waiting for you to stop what you're doing and take off your headphones.

mulmen 4y ago
It's IRC without the headaches.
- jedberg 4y ago
  I have the same complaint about IRC. :). I'm ok with both Slack and IRC for collaborating on an immediate problem, like an outage, but I hate having it just sit there as a way for someone to ping me any time.
  - mulmen 4y ago
    Sure but your complaint is about chat apps, not Slack specifically. For the people who "love" Slack it is just IRC but easier.
    - jedberg 4y ago
      That’s fair, but even between slack and IRC I much prefer IRC for real time collaboration and any chat app for one on on conversations. Slack threads are the worst thing to happen to IRC. Pick a modality. Is it a real time conversation or asynchronous threads? And then having one on one and group collaborations in the same place means both are done poorly. It also means the notifications for both get mixed together. I want to get notified when someone posts to a group in slack, and I also want to get notified when I have a direct message, but not at the same time.
      - mulmen 4y ago
        I love threads. They're lightweight channels. In large, busy channels it allows parallel conversations. I see no reason a thread would be strictly asynchronous or real time. That's an organizational expectation. And anyone who expects real-time responses outside of a call needs to come back down to Earth.

mayormcheeseman 4y ago

I expected C#/dotnet to make a little more headway considering all of the work being done and released recently, plus the push to make it more cross-platform than it already is.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Microsoft usually has pretty good documentation. Maybe that lowers the need to use SO, which would lower the odds of those developers being active on SO. 28% is still pretty good compared to Java's 33%.
- mayormcheeseman 4y ago
  Oh definitely, Microsoft docs are usually very well written. And you're right, those percentages look pretty good.

jarek83 4y ago

Salary part - I wonder if those results make much sense. I remember that question did not specify the currency and also the previous question to it was the country of origin, which could suggest to use your local currency. At least I was not sure what to put there.

jarek83 4y ago

I wonder if there might be a bias in lang/framework popularity results towards those that give more challenge to devs. Like the more problems you have with a tool the more often you go to SO and it makes it more likely to fill the survey.

prohobo 4y ago

I love that C++ developers only want to work with C++ and Python, while nearly everyone else is doing web stuff.

a_e_k 4y ago
1. It's a combination that hits the sweet spot for the "alternate hard and soft layers" architecture. 2. Python is quick to write for scripts, one-offs, and things that don't need to the performance of C++. 3. The ecosystem is fairly stable and low-drama. (Speaking as one of those C++ and Python devs.)
TillE 4y ago
This is hilarious because that's literally me. I use C++ professionally and where it's appropriate for hobby stuff, and Python for nearly everything else. Ok I also use C# for the parts of game development where Python is too slow / not well integrated, but C++ would be overkill. But web dev? No way. Trendy new languages? Meh.
sharedptr 4y ago
Same here, I just want to get work done and they both meet my needs for performant stuff and web stuff. I hear a lot of noise about rust but I still didn’t find motivation to commit to learn it

butterNaN 4y ago

I went through 'I need to learn a new language' phase a few weeks ago. I decided to go with Elixir because it seems fun (I have no Functional experience). However, I am seriously considering Rust, because it seems so universally loved. Maybe the grass is greener on the other side? I will definitely pick up Rust when I feel I am comfortable enough with Elixir. I primarily want to work with Distributed Systems, but It seems the best 'setup' is Elixir for Distribution logic and Rust for leaf-nodes-number-crunching logic.

Taywee 4y ago
I'd recommend Rust even if just because the available material for learning it is really good: https://www.rust-lang.org/learn https://www.rust-lang.org/learn I'm just recommending Rust in general, not over Elixir, because I've never used Elixir and have no experience in that area. Rust is a pretty easy language to love.
lawn 4y ago
Both Rust and Elixir are languages people generally love, and I too really like them both.
kretaceous 4y ago
I'll politely hijack this thread to ask for suggestions about what functional language to learn next. I have no functional experience apart from dealing with similar, toned down concepts in JavaScript. I was considering Clojure or Elixir depending on tooling, ecosystem, market worth and most importantly, what can it teach me. The reason I got inclined to Elixir was to learn Phoenix/LiveView. The reason for Clojure was it's very much adored here and it seems a good starting language for FP. Rust is in my list but maybe sometime later this year.
- ducharmdev 4y ago
  While I like the functional aspects of Rust, not sure I would call it a functional language - still very much worth learning though. Maybe a slightly unconventional answer, but F# is quite nice. https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/ https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

mayormcheeseman 4y ago

I really want to learn Rust, but I just don't have enough time in the day to commit to learning it if I'm not going to be able to find a job with it that doesn't involve blockchain or cryptocurrencies. Can anyone tell me how the general Rust job market looks for you guys outside of things like Indeed?

bobnamob 4y ago
If you can hold your nose and work for a hyperscaler there's plenty of rust work to go around.
leafario2 4y ago
Not a big job market for sure, but for example the car industry on Germany is ramping up quite a bit!
mdtusz 4y ago
I think it's a silent market at this point. The company I'm at is using it, and anecdotally, many other companies are as well in small greenfield projects, so I anticipate there will be growing demand for developers that know rust in coming years. The downside of this is that there will be a massive influx of people learning rust, similar to "the python problem". At the moment, most people that know rust are for the most part competent with it, but I fear that may change as the supply side increases.

jonteru 4y ago

Interesting results as always, but on the salary side I find it really hard to believe that on the executive level (C suite/VP) the median annual salary is just 6k bigger than that of engineering managers. I'd imagine not a lot of executives respond to this survey so that probably skews the results.

StevenWaterman 4y ago
A 3-person startup probably has a CEO, probably doesn't have an engineering manager
wiseowise 4y ago
> Interesting results as always, but on the salary side I find it really hard to believe that on the executive level (C suite/VP) the median annual salary is just 6k bigger than that of engineering managers. C suite/VP that receive salary that is substantially higher than engineering managers don't sit on StackOverflow.

kertoip_1 4y ago

I wish they asked more about remote working, e.g. "Do you work for a company that operates overseas?". I'm also curious how does those answers differ by country: which nationalities are most open to work remotely for foreign companies? Where do people from my country work when they work remotely abroad?

crummy 4y ago
I'd like to see a split between actual remote work status vs desired remote work status (e.g. are you hybrid but would prefer to be fully remote?)

TrackerFF 4y ago

Wonder if that Rust lust comes from Rust developers themselves - i.e, programmers that use Rust a lot in their spare time, and really want to use it in their work too.

Macha 4y ago
My understanding is this is the generally accepted theory for most of the highly "want to use" technologies. Likewise the least "want to use" technologies tend to be business-y type tools where people might be made to use them for the ease of other stakeholders, or integration with frameworks only used by e.g. legacy enterprise software.

Yuioup 4y ago

One web framework I expected to see trend downwards for professional developers is Angular, slowly being replaced by vue but my prediction did not seem to come true. Angular is steady while vue even trended downwards. The absolute king is React. Clearly professional developers are choosing to go for it because it looks like a safe bet.

runarberg 4y ago
They are also choosing it because that’s what they know, or that’s what the project lead picked. And the project lead might have picket it because it is a company policy or because their manager told them to pick what ever would have the most available talent, etc.
agumonkey 4y ago
I like vue a lot for weird reasons, but it seems vue3 hit some roadblocks. The boxed refs are unpretty, and now they look like react-metoo product.
blablabla123 4y ago
I kind of want to like Angular since it's so nicely integrated. But working with it is clearly not fun...
bigDinosaur 4y ago
Angular got into Big Corporate, which ensures it'll last a while. Horrible thing.
faizshah 4y ago
Anecdotally, a lot of devs are picking React over vue at work simply because everyone else is picking React. I was kinda surprised Svelte didn’t even show up given that people are calling it the next in line. I guess React will be the new jquery for a while.
WuxiFingerHold 4y ago
The next gen frameworks like Svelte or SolidJS are much easier to use, still more powerful and way faster. I have no clue why people keep using the old ones. The argument that the old ones have larger ecosystems is true but not appropriate as integration of pure JS libs is very easy with both Svelte and SolidJS. I especially recommend people looking into SolidJS: https://www.solidjs.com/ https://www.solidjs.com/

politelemon 4y ago

> A Linux-based OS is more popular than macOS - speaking to the appeal of using open source software. I'm glad to see this, and I hope this trend can continue. Though I wish I worked for such a company, and I friendly-envy people who have such a privilege.

zmxz 4y ago
We have the freedom to choose between Windows/Linux/Mac Most frontend devs went with MacOS. All backend devs went with Linux. MacOS is the one that causes problems with containerization and virtualization. Addition: frontend devs use Safari. This comes with its own problems due to browser inconsistencies between platforms. TL;DR: we have a subset of devs who went with MacOS and there was no tangible gain. I'm not tribalist, I merely like things that work. Personally, I think Windows is the best looking UI but I use Linux for work - I'm devoid of personal preferences when it comes to getting things done. In my opinion, and this is by no means a fact - it's a mere opinion, Mac is a status symbol rather than productivity indicator.
- arvinsim 4y ago
  Frontend developers go with MacOS because it's the only platform that allows them to test their sites in Safari.
geraldwhen 4y ago
I’d like to filter to United States and reassess. I don’t know anyone running Linux. It could be the case that only US developers can afford macs.

wiseowise 4y ago

Surprised at average Ocaml salary. But then Jane Street folks, probably, don't use platforms like StackOverflow.

acchow 4y ago
It's because Ocaml is from France and is taught in many schools in France. Europe overall has much lower salaries than the US.

gdsdfe 4y ago

Wait so in Canada a student is payed $116k+ more than a data scientist or a data engineer or a backend developer etc. ?!? How does that make any sense ?

_8j50 4y ago

Not gonna lie, I am a little upset about Ocaml here.

khoobid_shoma 4y ago

The numbers do not say what is really better. It just reflects responders' opinions.

bigbillheck 4y ago
> It just reflects responders' opinions. That's why they called it a 'Developer Survey'.

whatever1 4y ago

How many web frameworks are people building per day? I built my last website in 2018 and I cannot recognize any of the top frameworks listed today by SO. Even worse the frameworks I knew are now at the bottom lol

jstx1 4y ago
I don't get what you mean - the top 3 frameworsk are Node, React and jQuery, the youngest of them (React) was released in 2013.
- whatever1 4y ago
  According to SO top 3 most loved are: Svelte, phoenix, deno. I literally had to google them

ch4s3 4y ago

I'm excited to see that Elixir is the second most loved language in the survey, especially since most Elixir users don't engage with stack overflow.

ksec 4y ago

Ruby is missing entirely in the [1] Salary and experience by language. 156 People responded were programming with Crystal professionally. A language that is still very very young. Even ignoring Node.Js, there are 3x [2] more Django developers than Rails. If people thinks Phoenix is young or niche, it has half of Rails professional usage in this survey. Django's current position should be what Rails tries to achieve. 15% usage is enough for a market sustainable position. Some Google developer told me Fresh Grad or Junior Software Engineers gets $200K Total Comp per year. That is equal to the median salary of Senior Executive (C-Suite, VP, etc.) in the US. When developers with 5 - 10 years of experience are calling for a "fair" $400K Total Compensation on Twitter. Someone on HN once said Google Senior SWE make up to $700K. The salary gap within the industry is huge. [1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-... [2] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-web-frameworks-and-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t...

bombcar 4y ago
The gap is insane even between the FAANGs, someone got an offer at $450 total comp (inc grants over five years) at one and the other couldn't even break 225/yr total. Something is gonna have to give.
- aiisjustanif 4y ago
  Is important to reflect on compensation gaps among top 10 companies in the US over time and the positions that they valued most (whether fair to value them that way or not). That will tell the story of if there is anything to give.
- xenadu02 4y ago
  > Something is gonna have to give. Why? The work product of a senior engineer (on average) is worth some multiple of the TC or the company wouldn't be paying it. Tom Cruise makes way more than the director or the studio execs too. Because he sells tickets/rentals that make the movie more profitable. Same thing.
4y ago

TruthWillHurt 4y ago

There are more blind developers than non-binary ones. Perhaps we should add Braille to our business cards besides the he/him they/them descriptors.

crummy 4y ago

Delphi is #7 in the loved languages ranking? Kind of surprised to see that. Is this nostalgia or is it actually a great language?

radicalriddler 4y ago
Yup, at 65% I'm wondering whether most people are voting based on Object Pascal rather than the Delphi ecosystem. It is not a good ecosystem, but Object Pascal is quite enjoyable to work with (really makes you think about memory management).
sakesun 4y ago
It's the last in the most wanted list.

miffy900 4y ago

17% of learners report not using version control. I'm surprised that isn't higher TBH. But who are these 1.38% of professional developers who self-report that they do not use version control? Please rethink your life...

lawgimenez 4y ago
Yes that was my same reaction when I read it. If you click on the #, there are around ~700 of them not using version control.

lawgimenez 4y ago

As a mobile developer (Swift and Kotlin) not sure how I feel about this survey. Or I'm glad that both are not that popular, less competition, etc.

Gunnerhead 4y ago
Same here. Also surprised about the salaries, I'm paid the same as my backend colleagues with similar YoE.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  Also the unpopularity of both Android Studio and Xcode. Which for me is overblown.

zwilliamson 4y ago

SREs reign supreme in Individual comp again.

pojzon 4y ago

IMHO being good at asking goopd questions when searching for solutions is a skill in itself and if done correctly -> can save you days of reading documentation or source code debugging (which both can often be very poor). So by Stackoverflow I “waste” few hours getting “less things done” my productivity is “worse” by gaining few days reducing time required for solving the issue. Scratching my head here.. Ps. Thr survay seems extremely biased by getting mostly JS developers / freelancers to respond. Enterprise world looks completely differently.

edumucelli 4y ago

"Chef developers are the highest paid but Chef is also the most dreaded other tool." maybe there is a correlation, they receiving a compensation to work on such tool?

ramcle 4y ago

Does anyone know why Salesforce is no longer included in the survey? It was included up till 2018 in "Platforms", but since then it's been strangely absent.

abhaynayar 4y ago

Good to see Security Professional as a Developer Type. I recall looking for it in previous surveys but couldn't find it.

emredu 4y ago

Highlights from the results: 1. Git Is the King: The Use of Git Is Increasing Year by Year 2. Version Control Universe: GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps 3. Docker Usage Is Increasing Year by Year 4. Docker and Kubernetes Are in Every Developer’s Toolbox 5. Communication Matters: Developers Love Slack 6. You Probably Have Knowledge Silos As Productivity Killers 7. Smaller Organizations Often Tend to Be in the Office 8. Developer Experience: Processes, Tools, and Programs Within an Organization Read More: https://betterprogramming.pub/stack-overflow-2022-developer-survey-where-is-the-industry-heading-3cd4a0cd41f3 https://betterprogramming.pub/stack-overflow-2022-developer-...

fullstackchris 4y ago

Super late to the party but suprised how dreaded Gatsby is. I've been using it since its infancy and I've only seen improvements. I can consistently build sites with it that get a 100/100 score with Google's Lighthouse tool. Wonder if anyone could chime in if they ever see this.

arvinsim 4y ago

> 88% of Professional Developers code outside of work, with 73% of them coding as a hobby. This is what I am afraid of. It leads to an arms race where everyone now has to code outside of work to be competitive. As someone who values work-life balance, this is a worrying trend.

juice_bus 4y ago

(semi unrelated) Does anyone else find them selves using SO less and less as you gain more experience? I'm over 10 years now and rarely find my self on SO.

jamil7 4y ago
Yeah, more or less, I still do come back to it when I'm picking up a new language or framework.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
Absolutely. Two of the big reasons are improved understanding and problem solving skills on my part and improvements in the tech stack I use day to day making things more clear and covering more use cases cleanly. The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound. As such when I use SO these days it’s usually not for wholesale solutions to problems but rather to add to a greater body of examples of APIs in action which I can then abstract and use as needed. It’s decent for this use case.
- plonk 4y ago
  > The third is that I’ve come to recognize that the average quality of answers on SO is quite poor — while they technically serve as solutions to posted problems, they often come with big caveats… use of private/deprecated APIs, hackiness, and feature misuse abound. The real clean answer is usually a mildly upvoted comment that scolds the answerer for violating a standard or using a bad practice. SO is still useful when that happens.
stemlord 4y ago
That would be great. I work in a generalist type of field where learning new tools is part of the job so I am still googling the same stupid questions almost every day
- 4y ago

pxeger1 4y ago

Could the title be updated to include the word "Results"? When I saw this, I thought it was the survey itself (which has already happened, obviously)

billpg 4y ago

I answered "Very Favorable" to "How favorable are you about blockchain, crypto, and decentralization?" I am indeed very favorable indeed to decentralization. I also think blockchains are almost always a waste of electricity by computers pointlessly playing Numberwang all day. (I'm not quite sure if "almost" is needed there.)

bitwize 4y ago
"Pointlessly playing Numberwang all day" is the best, most accurate description of blockchain activity I've ever heard.
- hannofcart 4y ago
  I was thinking the exact same thing. That comment deserves some kind of Hall of Fame status!
  - billpg 4y ago
    Thank you. If my comment does get into a hall of fame, please edit out the repeated "indeed".
mercenario 4y ago
> I also think blockchains are almost always a waste of electricity by computers pointlessly playing Numberwang all day. (I'm not quite sure if "almost" is needed there.) In relation to what? Do you have an alternative way of maintaining blockchains security?
boardwaalk 4y ago
I agree this is a very unfortunate grouping of topics. The irony is that there’s a lot of cryptocurrency stuff that isn’t even well decentralized, so it’s almost an objectively bad grouping.

treis 4y ago

(1) My poor back button (2) Those YoY salary increases are bonkers (3) Poor Ruby on Rails. Seems to be slowly sliding into irrelevance in the face of stiff competition.

tra3 4y ago
Rails is boring tech [0] now. Phoenix seems to top the "wanted" listed, but it only has about a ~1000 respondents. If I had to guess I'd say js/typescript will eventually eat rails, django etc. If I started coding today, or indeed within the last 10 years, it's not clear why I would choose anything other than Javascript. [0]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
- faizshah 4y ago
  If you look at most loved languages, most wanted languages and most popular languages among both students and professionals Python and Typescript are the best choices for new stuff. Of the newer languages it seems Rust has the most momentum behind it.
Gigachad 4y ago
Been a Rails dev for my whole career and at this point my love for it is slowly sliding away. It’s the most amazing framework ever for the first few years but after the app starts to grow older and larger it becomes almost unworkable. It’s virtually impossible to update even the smallest gem and know you haven’t caused issues. A rails upgrade is impossible without 100% test coverage of everything and even then you have to cross your fingers that nothing slipped through. The current place I work at is investigating pulling things out of rails and in to a Rust macro service so we can have some confidence that changes actually work.
- jstummbillig 4y ago
  The investigation out-withstanding, do you actually know of any also amazing framework that has been used for more than a few years (which I guess is already pretty long on average for web tech stuff) that performs better in this department? I wonder what we would even fairly compare Rails to. Django? Laravel is already quite a bit young but sure, why not. I guess finding someone who actually has deep, year long and equivalent experience on the candidates would be pretty hard.

andsoitis 4y ago

Of the ~52k responses: - almost 33% of people have programmed professionally for less than 4 years - just over 27% have programmed professionally between 5 and 9 years.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
I suspect junior developers care a lot more about Stack Overflow than more experienced developers. When I first started my career, I looked at SO at least daily. Now (10 years later), I look at it maybe monthly when I'm searching for a solution to a weird library/config issue. If that hunch is correct, it would explain why the data are so skewed towards people with less than 5 years of professional experience.
- Washuu 4y ago
  30 years of coding experience here.(Professional + student) I only end up on Stack Overflow for cryptic regex stuff that I forgot and ffmpeg syntax.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  In my case I am not sure if it's just more experience or search engine degradation of the past 15 years. I used to search for solutions a lot more, nowadays, with the amount of content farming and spammy blog content, I feel a lot more averse to any search query at all. The threshold is raised such that I really need to be stuck to go online and I will usually end up in vendor forums at some endpoint.

NKosmatos 4y ago

When you see (once more) that despite your 20 years of experience you're being paid less that what students are being paid in other countries :-) (yes people, I know it's my fault that I'm still staying at this job... no need for downvotes or negative comments).

jrochkind1 4y ago
you are not alone
anticristi 4y ago
Depending on your geography, it might be a fair price to pay for universal healthcare, free daycare and university for your kids, as well as having a notion of evening and weekend. I'm still looking for a golden tool to convert total compensation plus geography into expected happiness.
- mminer237 4y ago
  The average American pays 10% of his income on healthcare expenses. [1] That would mean it would be around $5,000/year. The US charges maybe $30,000 more for college than some cheaper countries. With two kids, that's maybe $1,500/year amortized over a career. Those aren't going to be worth it for the average person unless you live in Norway, Luxembourg, or the UAE. I doubt there's any country where those outweigh the average programmer salary difference, let alone after taxes. Even if you have a serious health condition and crappy health insurance, deductibles cap out at $7,000/year. [1]: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/05/02/health-care-costs https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2019/05/02/health-ca...
  - Gadiguibou 4y ago
    This feels a little reductive of the benefits that come from public education and healthcare. Developers making 300,000$ a year don't make up the entirety of the US population. I think living somewhere where everyone gets an opportunity at life contributes greatly to overall happiness and helps reduce social tensions. Good urban design, a nationalized electricity grid, or train system also contribute a lot to the disparity in taxes and salaries.

shagie 4y ago

Students claim to have 4.86 years (on average) of professional experience. O_o The lowest years of experience of actual professionals belongs to... blockchain developers with 9.63 years (on average) of professional experience.

kiernanmcgowan 4y ago
My guess is that there’s some sampling bias for the student population - if you’re plugged in enough to be doing this survey you’ve probably been hacking for a while. Fwiw, I started getting paid for slinging code at 16, maintained the website for a university group in college, while still doing other work in the summers. I probably would have answered with “6 years of experience” if asked when I graduated. Is that truly “professional experience”? In retrospect probably not, but 22yo me would have been too stubborn to answer otherwise.
- tester756 4y ago
  Do you take hours ratio into the account? e.g if you've been working 4h a week, then it'd be weird to say after year that you have 1 year of commercial experience, when your colleagues spent 40 hours / week and have "only" 1 year too I believe that pay is not necessary, but working for somebody else or in team (e.g OSS) is necessary. So yea, I wouldn't say that hacking something even cool, but alone is commercial xp.
tester756 4y ago
I do have 4 years of commercial experience and I'll be getting masters next year. That's because I've been working full time since 2nd semester But I still do believe that it's weird. Maybe people think about experience in general instead of commercial, full time?
kerblang 4y ago
Just a note, the comment is quoting from this: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-years-of-professional-coding-experience-by-developer-type https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-experience-yea... BTW many people go (back) to school after obtaining some professional experience. Not sure about the context of this part of the poll though.

davidspiess 4y ago

Is it possible to find out the average salary of a specific country? In the survey it's only possible to switch between US, India, Germany, UK and Canada.

speedgoose 4y ago
My union does that, you may have one for IT professionals where you live.
pxeger1 4y ago
I presume that's because they didn't have enough data for other countries.

mg 4y ago

Observations: 1: Amazing that Javascript is the most popular language, despite nobody has yet managed to write a fast FizzBuzz in it :) https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-throughput-fizz-buzz https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr... 2: SQL and Bash both went up a percentage point! Yay! The art of terse and efficient code is not yet dying. 3: Strange that "Web frameworks" mixes backend and frontend frameworks. Why is "node.js" listed here? Isn't node.js a runtime? 4: Docker made a big jump from 49% to 64%. I consider that a good thing. I don't believe in "containerizing" applications. But I prefer to have Docker stay around for the long term. Because containers on their own are so darn useful. 5: Git is at 94%! Really? 94% of developers use Git? Or do they use some tool that is using abstracting Git away, like GitHub? Anyhow. Thats great, because Git (like vim) is one of the best pieces of software out there and I love that it will be around for a very long time.

bluedino 4y ago
There is no way that 94% of programmers know how to use Git. Most of them barely know how to program.
GlitchMr 4y ago
> 1: Amazing that Javascript is the most popular language, despite nobody has yet managed to write a fast FizzBuzz in it :) The reason for that is that standard output implementation in Node.js is very slow. When the challenge is to write as fast as possible to standard output that's not ideal.
silentguy 4y ago
Regarding Git being 94%, if you see the table just below about interacting with the version control system, you'd see 83.57% users using command-line. 28.44% are using version control hosting service web GUI. 83.57% is still a big number of people who are using git with fewer abstractions on top.
speedgoose 4y ago
It’s because it’s not possible.

newaccount2021 4y ago

layer8 4y ago

They don’t seem to answer the most important question: Does using spaces over tabs still predict a higher salary?

kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
Tabs, but only when set to three spaces.
jve 4y ago
I never understood the deal behind tabs vs spaces figths. Was it because of legacy editors or what? Editor now helps formatting code, even when pressing enter button, it aligns entry on new line.
- layer8 4y ago
  For me, important differences are how the cursor behaves when moving around, and the effect of backspace. I like consistent movements, i.e. always one character position per keypress, and therefore prefer spaces.
nailer 4y ago
Real programmers indent with the corn emoji.
ho_schi 4y ago
I'm using tabs. Explains a lot...

viggity 4y ago

Is the raw data available?

jesprenj 4y ago
+1. The website is unusably slow for me.

yuy910616 4y ago

Udemy coming in at 66% is pretty surprising to me. I personally purchased some 50 courses on there, and am happy with the result (especially owning the course and not having to deal with a subscription), but it is surprising to me that it basically won that market. It isn't all that friendly to course maker iirc. And the course quality varies a lot. Its pricing model is also very shady, giving me the impression that it is a poorly run company. Of course - youtube is not included; I imagine that'll really skew the graph edit: shoot, I just checked and I actually purchased 98 courses.

ravenstine 4y ago
Yeah, though I thought Udemy had the least favorable reputation just because of the weird pricing tactics and a lot of courses being glorified tutorials. There's some great stuff on there, but I didn't think it would rank that much higher than Coursera.

TIPSIO 4y ago

Interesting as always. It would be great to have a UX to easily compare the trends, such as 2022 vs 2021 vs 2020 though. Unless I missed it. The "Web framework and technologies" section doesn't seem accurate to compare in a meaningful way. For example, they have Node.js as a standalone option probably throwing off everything. Then these compare weird when put together as options: Next, Nuxt, React, Vue, etc. Love it or hate it, jQuery was also #3.

nailer 4y ago
I wouldn't count 'node' as a framework but rather a JS implementation. Same way one counts 'ruby' or 'python'.

pier25 4y ago

Svelte is doing great in the loved/dreaded metric. First of all JS technologies. Second overall.

gedy 4y ago
I love Svelte and maintain some open source libraries for it, but in recent job search I was struck by a near total lack of jobs mentioning it being used.
- pier25 4y ago
  I don't think it will ever get as big as React or jQuery, but once SvelteKit is released I expect it to grow much faster.

ctvo 4y ago

Surprising for me: AWS's market share is still Azure + GCP combined amongst professional developers [1]. With various articles about Microsoft's success I was expecting lower. The same for loved / dreaded. AWS scores significantly better [2] in terms of loved over other cloud platforms. Being in the HN bubble I was expecting that to be lower also. The other items that scored high on loved / dreaded were mostly new technologies vs. dominant incumbents. 1 - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technologies-platform-prof https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-popular-technolog... 2 - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-platform-love-dread https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#most-loved-dreaded-and...

npalli 4y ago
Regarding Azure, it is quite possible the primary developers are corporate/in-house types and not big on responding to this particular survey. About 70,000 developers (in total) responded which is a small fraction of the developer universe.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  And I believe microsoft counts their SaaS offerings in their Azure usage, which significantly skews the numbers.
- swyx 4y ago
  always the same criticism with surveys. and yet this is one of the biggest surveys in the world. one has to try.
  - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
    Yes, and its quite likely correct. Possibly why it's often raised!
clumsysmurf 4y ago
As an Android developer since 2009, I will not touch anything from Google ever again. Its a very asymmetrical relationship, and if something goes wrong, like your account gets suspended, its a Kafkaesque nightmare, with usually no recourse.

Barrera 4y ago

> Clojure remains the highest-paid language to know. Any ideas around why that could be?

caterwhal 4y ago
I've been a professional Clojure developer for some time now. My main observation when it comes to this is that Clojure is often picked to solve particular problems based on the capabilities it offers over other languages very deliberately. I've seen quite a few cases where an organization had attempted to solve a really high value problem with a more mainstream language, realized that it was next to impossible to succeed that way, and then tried Clojure with great results. In short, oftentimes Clojure makes it easy to solve really difficult problems and expert Clojure developers are in short supply. Some examples of problems that I've seen Clojure excel in solving: 1. Complex rule modeling 2. Optimization systems 3. Big Data pipelines 4. Highly concurrent systems 5. Streaming systems
yen223 4y ago
My hypothesis is that Clojure doesn't get used outside of the US, and so the median salary isn't pulled down by the comparatively lower salaries outside of the US
- askonomm 4y ago
  Tons of Clojure in Europe. Especially Northern Europe. Following the job boards and Clojurians Slack channel's #jobs channels I figure it's about 50/50 for US and EU.
  - redbar0n 4y ago
    Not that many Clojurians in Oslo (Norway), unfortunately. 121 members in the Meetup group: https://www.meetup.com/clojure-oslo/ https://www.meetup.com/clojure-oslo/ For comparison: Ruby - The meetup group of the tiny Ruby community (confirmed by experience) has 329 members: https://www.meetup.com/ruby-meetup-oslo/ https://www.meetup.com/ruby-meetup-oslo/ Imba - The meetup group of the niche full-stack web programming language Imba, has 134 members. https://www.meetup.com/imba-oslo-meetup/ https://www.meetup.com/imba-oslo-meetup/

pastor_bob 4y ago

As an aside, I find the search-ability of this presentation to be terrible. I tried looking for word with CMD+F and the section I was looking at completely disappeared!

Aachen 4y ago
I don't remember last years' but this was pretty mediocre indeed. E.g. after the first two graphs, I used autoscroll (middle click, move mouse) so that I 'saw' the whole page and all the graphs loaded and animations triggered. Then ctrl+up and read more comfortably. How stackoverflow builds this in when flashing content is such a common annoyance, I don't know. Sure, you don't want to load a megabyte of data for when people open the page for just 2 seconds, but there are animations on top of the lazy loading, the actual data is not that large anyway, and the loading distance is not hard to increase either.
rurp 4y ago
Breaking cmd+f functionality will immediately sour me on a site. It's surprising how many tech companies go out of their way to ruin basic behavior like that.

usrbinbash 4y ago

Docker going strong :-) Unsurprising, really. The usefulness of it cannot be overstated. Doesn't even matter if its used anywhere in the deployment chain; simply having the ability to pull up a replica of almost any *nix environment on my laptop in mere seconds, using it for tests, and then throwing it away resetting it again in mere seconds is beyond awesome, no matter if what I'm working on then goes into a huge complicated deployment chain, or is shoved onto some on-premises, zero-abstractions, baremetal server. And how is it all configured? Plain text files. How is it controlled? Command Line. Meaning I can script it every way I want, using the tools I already have and use. Doesn't get in the way, doesn't demand that I work around it...it works with me and my tools in the same way they already work together. Oh, and of course, good bye and good riddance to the days when I had to install and configure local RDMS for tests. Everything I use has an official image, so I just write some small setup script, a Dockerfile, knit everything together in a docker-compose.yml and presto, done: Application stack is up and running. To me, Docker is as essential as my text editor these days.

_ZeD_ 4y ago
> Unsurprising, really. The usefulness of it cannot be overstated. meh, I can count on my hand the times it was useful to me. oh, and having to deal with docker desktop is not fun
- plonk 4y ago
  > oh, and having to deal with docker desktop is not fun To stay sane, just forget it exists until it crashes irretrievably, then reinstall it and repeat. Containers and images being disposable is the whole point anyway.
- umvi 4y ago
  Well yeah, Docker + Windows isn't the best experience. I recommend WSL if you must go down that route.
  - GordonS 4y ago
    It used to be a bit flakey pre-WSL2 integration ~2-3 years back - it's been absolutely rock solid for me on Windows since then, just like on Linux.

throwaway889900 4y ago

People love APL more than Java? Interesting, I always bring up APL as a joke.

Beltalowda 4y ago
Only about 500 people filled in APL, whereas about 22k people filled in Java. For a lot of people APL isn't really on the radar.
abrudz 4y ago
Makes sense to me (but I'm of course biased) due to selection bias. My impression is that those for whom APL clicks, find the day-to-day APL experience very enjoyable, while those that just don't get it will tend to leave APL behind. Probably not so for more widely-used languages, where people will stay with them, even if it means daily frustration.

diarrhea 4y ago

I was under the impression Solidity was a dumpster fire language. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14810008. It ranks surprisingly high. Is this riding off of Ethereum’s popularity? Perhaps in combination with the skewed sample (towards young/beginning devs).

jedberg 4y ago

> A majority of respondents (75%) have been working for 14 or fewer years as a professional developer, meaning they’ve never worked in a world without Stack Overflow. Oh boy did this make me feel old.

vgeek 4y ago
The horrors of expertsexchange?
- jedberg 4y ago
  Even worse -- the horrors of having to find a book in the library to answer your question. When I started working all the senior devs had full bookshelves of O'Reilly books, and if you got stuck you went to them to either ask a question or use their books. Then as they left the company, all of us would fight over who got ownership of the O'Reilly book collection!
  - systematical 4y ago
    This is how I learned and rounded out the edges with random forums.

ask_b123 4y ago

I always miss out on answering these surveys and only remember their existence when the results come out.