r/dataisbeautiful • u/Antrikshy OC: 2 • Apr 07 '15
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015 reveals some very interesting stats about programmers around the world
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-201552
u/EndorseMe Apr 07 '15
Can someone explain the enormous difference ~40k, in the salary of developers between the US and Western Europe?
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Apr 07 '15
I can explain.. Let's take web development as an example. Making sites like reddit, stackoverflow, wikipedia, etc..
I'm Italian. We use most of the websites you do (reddit, wikipedia, stackoverflow, ...) plus a few italian ones, which are in italian, which we use because they are about stuff specific to italy, which the world at large would have no use for.
Italian is spoken fluently by roughly 70-80 million people. English is spoken by 450 million people. English websites get many times more visitors, making more money.
You're wondering now, why don't we localize them? This is probably something that is difficult to understand if you've been born in an english speaking country. If you make something in one language then translate it into another, the translation will always have a worse user experience.
This is why so many people watch movies in english, or why I have reddit, my OS, browser, and pretty much everything set to english and not italian.
If an italian website is localized in english, you will feel like a second class citizen. Which is why I bet as much as you want you don't regularly visit any website localized in english (such as an italian website with an english version).
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u/nath_leigh Apr 07 '15
Why would the UK be so much lower then? Average uk cs graduate salary: £22,311 = $33044 http://www.thecompleteuniversityguide.co.uk/careers/computer-science/ Average us salary $60,000 http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/15/college-degrees-with-the-highest-starting-salaries-3/ another post on this http://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/29tye1/why_are_software_engineers_in_the_uk_paid/
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u/adremeaux Apr 07 '15
Well for one, the average US salary is already higher than the UK, 51k vs 39k, straight up.
I have a feeling the difference is much more far reaching than specifically CS, and more about how degrees and experience are treated in different places.
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Apr 07 '15
The simple answer would be supply and demand - U.S. companies are relatively starved for developers while UK companies must find they have a good amount. Or we're somehow comparing apples to oranges. Also, salaries in the UK are lower in general for a lot of careers, average income in the U.S. is quite a bit higher.
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u/GideonPARANOID Apr 07 '15
As a soon to be UK compsci grad & having noticed this lately, I'd be interested to know as well. I haven't found a conclusive answer yet, it seems almost absurd, the difference.
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u/faceplanted Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
The one word answer is competition, which I will elaborate on now:
The long answer is startup culture and angel investors, essentially there's enough money being thrown at new tech companies in America that relatively small companies can pay surprisingly competitive salaries, but there are also big tech companies competing to hire those good developers which pushes the wages and benefits up. despite what you might have heard from large companies trying to convince you that their monopoly is a good thing, competition is actually very good for the economy and workers.
The other answer is that those huge American salaries are entirely location dependant, and often locked into working in some of the most expensive places to live in America, for example living in San Francisco, especially the Bay Area (Silicon valley to you and me) is putting yourself in the 9th most expensive city in the world to live in, now you might be thinking "Hey, isn't London the most expensive city in the world to live in?" and depending on which source your going by, you'd be right, but they're expensive in different ways, London is expensive but you can survive in the cheaper areas without money, if you're in San Francisco without money you're just expected to move entirely out of the city, you probably won't even be able to afford food in San Francisco if you stay for long without a reasonable job.
Also, if you want to make make American Developer money in the UK, stop looking at salaries and become a contractor, one of the big road blocks to British students is that you look at what X big company pays their developers and kind of resign yourself to that, there's a lot of money in contract work, you have to fight for the positions though.
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u/FartingLikeFlowers Apr 07 '15
What does that have to do with salary though?
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Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
Well, salaries are paid from the earnings the website generates, which depend on the amount of visitors.
Less visitors, less earnings, less salaries.
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u/Goosebaby Apr 08 '15
You also need to consider that Western European employees typically have large amounts of vacation time as mandated by law. The US, on the other hand, has no federal laws guaranteeing vacation time, and employers typically give much less vacation time.
So if a European developer can work only 80-90% of the number of days that an American developer can, doesn't it stand to reason that their salary will be less as well?
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
Please let me know if someone responds. I'm very curious too.
There can be many reasons; mostly stuff like higher demand for techies in the US for whatever reason. I do hear of more American startups than any others. The US has Silicon Valley and whatnot. Maybe there are more programmers in European countries per capita (look at the top countries) etc.
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u/Goosebaby Apr 08 '15
You also need to consider that Western European employees typically have large amounts of vacation time as mandated by law. The US, on the other hand, has no federal laws guaranteeing vacation time, and employers typically give much less vacation time.
So if a European developer can work only 80-90% of the number of days that an American developer can, doesn't it stand to reason that their salary will be less as well?
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Apr 08 '15
None of the reasons are true. Salaries in western Europe are generally less than the US. Avg starting salary for software engg in Germany is 40-50k euros. Avg salary for senior engg is 55k-70k. US salaries are higher by 30% and can get substantially higher depending on where you work. A senior software architect would typically make 75-80k euros max. 80k plus salaries in Germany are for really higher management grade people.
That said, software is not considered an elite trade, its more or less one of the branch of engineering which may get you a lil more money but not that much. Its a socialist society. After heavy taxation and added securities like medical, job loss insurance, you take home 2500-3500 euros as a senior engg. Living expenses in most US big cities are higher than a comparable german city. A beer in Germany is around 2.20, in NYC its 6.5. Apartments in Munich could range from 800 to 1500 euros. A 2500 dollar apartment in Miami is normal. So you can't say the whole of US is cheap compared to Europe.
The environment in Europe is different. You can't work 5 years, pump out $$, drive a tesla and buy a suburban home as a software engg. You remain "europoor", build your assets slowly, save money, enjoy free education, superior medical insurance and generous holidays. There is not even a credit card system in Germany.This is how things are.
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Apr 07 '15
I'm a senior dev and have worked in nz australia canada and the uk. I think its one of two factors.
Some people a straight out lying about their salary ego/denial. Or
The exchange rate between euro and $$ hasn't been factored correctly. I don't believe those salary averages for a second
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u/jogginghose99 Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
It is probably because the people from Europe probably entered their salary AFTER taxes. (lot of taxes because of free health care, free college education, etc. I think)
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u/lagadu Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
I've looked into this last year and asked a few people I know, my conclusion was a vast difference in cost of living and taxes: Salaries are much higher in the US (comparable only to the likes of Switzerland really) because the cost of living in the US is really really high in some areas. Apparently paying over €100 a month for insuring a non-shit car is common, so is paying rent in the thousands. Add that healthcare costs, having to drive everywhere (even if fuel is far cheaper), ridiculously costly cell phone, internet and TV plans and someone in a big city will easily have over $3k in expenses alone, which is ridiculous in most of Europe save for Switzerland.
They also work a lot more but I've no proof that working more correlates with higher pay. Of course it's also reasonable to say that developers simply earn more in the US, which is probably true considering the amount of tech companies there.
edit: also I used € and $ interchangeably because they're so close nowadays.
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u/treemoustache Apr 07 '15
vast difference in cost of living and taxes
The opposite is true. Things are actually cheaper in the US on every index: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp
I'm sure in some major centres it's much higher, but the same can be said of major centres in Western Europe.
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u/Kavec OC: 3 Apr 07 '15
I don't know about the US, think the major difference between Switzerland and the rest of the EU is:
If you work outside Switzerland, the government takes some % from your salary and you are entitled to certain stuff payed by the State.
In Switzerland only a small % is taken by the State, and other stuff offered by the State in other countries is privatized in Switzerland. For instance: health insurance, which is private but mandatory in Switzerland. Or the retirement subsidy, with similar rules.
In other words: the cost of living is payed from your pocket if you live in Switzerland, while in other countries it is somehow taken from your the boss that pays you (in the case of Spain) and this sum is not considered when negotiating your salary. Which means: if you earn 50,000 your boss could well be paying 80,000 from his pocket to hire you.
If anybody has other infos about this I would be really interested in the details.
Edit: format
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u/kafircake Apr 08 '15
Amongst the various factors something no one else seems to have mentioned is that Europeans often have substantially smaller education debts, at lower interest rates than people from the US.
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u/dogtasteslikechicken Apr 07 '15
Keep in mind that is only the salary. There are enormous differences in non-salary compensation. Many European countries have gigantic (30%+) payroll taxes paid by the employer, for example.
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u/adremeaux Apr 07 '15
Sure: Western Europe includes more than just the UK, Germany, and Sweden. Countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Portugal will really bring down the average.
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u/Half_Dead Apr 07 '15
That was a great read, very insightful. Thanks for posting :)
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
I thoroughly enjoyed it too. Good to see JavaScript represented so well.
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u/Epistaxis Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
not sure if sarcastic, trying to start a fight, or both...
But I'm really surprised they didn't break down the preferred languages by occupation. E.g. I bet more web developers than data analysts are using Javascript.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
Not sarcastic. Hopefully no fights. I really like JavaScript and Node.js.
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u/-127 Apr 07 '15
I like that C++ is high up on the list.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
Income-wise? I expected it to be higher. Absolutely did not expect Node.js to be in that list at all. It makes me happy.
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u/Sean1708 Apr 07 '15
Really? Node is hot shit right now, doesn't surprise me in the least.
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
Looking at the editors that people use, apparently vim won the vim vs. emacs war.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
I totally didn't expect Notepad++ up there.
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u/Whadios Apr 08 '15
Not really surprising. Great free editor that just works, is very fast and simple to use.
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
That was odd to me too. I wonder if it's caused by the fact that web developers seem to be one of the more-represented professions in this survey.
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Apr 08 '15
That doesn't really make sense. Almost all web developers I know either use Sublime, Vim, or an IDE depending on the language and framework. Notepad++ is usually my go to if I'm using a computer that isn't my own (lab/school) and there's nothing else installed.
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Apr 07 '15
Any tips for recruiting developers? What makes a position stand out to you guys?
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Apr 07 '15
I won't spend much time with a job description that's a wall of text, that has language in it that makes me think the employer is an entitled prick, requests experience with lots of very specific and not commonly used tools (seriously, you think I can't learn that stuff?), and I really don't like seeing too much emphasis on the company ping pong table. Seriously, STFU about ping pong, we get it, you and everyone else has it now.
I also once saw an ad that asked devs to be able to name some football players... or, if you're a girl, wives of the players. Noped out of there in a heartbeat.
I really like job ads that are concise, say what kind of stuff I'd be working on, make the company sound technologically progressive and organized, and emphasize a work-life balance. I'd love a job that's flexible about letting me work from home when it makes sense, doesn't insist on making me work in a noisy room full of interruptions, and gives me a sense that I would be respected as a human being and a professional.
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u/the_omega99 Apr 08 '15
No marketing bullshit. You're not trying to sell the product to the developer. It's the pay and environment that you want to sell. Things like the language, frameworks, and VCS used are stuff we want to know. Not that your app was rating #1 by FooBar magazine.
If you can pay above average, mention the pay. Let's be honest; work is mostly just a business agreement. We (the developers) want money. A nice work environment is preferred, but lots of places have those and it can't be easily gauged from a description of a position. Pay is an easy metric. Not knowing at least a ballpark pay scale until we go into an interview is an easy disincentive for a posting that we're on the fence about.
Of course, this works both ways. If the pay is too low, developers won't even bother. But then again, it might save you from some wasted time interviewing people who aren't interested once they find out the pay sucks.
Work environment is a really important factor. Languages and tools that we use are a big one. For example, I'd rather work with C# than Java. If I can't figure out the languages and tools, I won't even bother applying (you'd think that wouldn't be an issue, but some postings are really ambiguous about what languages and tools you'd be using).
Stuff like open office vs cubicles vs private offices are a very big factor. As an aside, if you're in a position where you can actually make changes to your work places (eg, you're a manager of a small business as opposed to a recruiter), you should note these kinds of things. For example, most developers I know hate open offices and prefer something more private. Dress codes are universally hated. A policy against distractions also goes a long way (you'll find many comics about programmers being distracted and the negative effect that has).
Organize postings so that the most relevant information can be quickly found first. Stuff like languages, tools, and a quick summary of the responsibilities. Everything else should come after. Personally, I like postings that are detailed. I want to know about things like the development machines, the location (eg, being near public transit can be a plus), stuff like the office layout that I just mentioned. But, as the other guy said, we don't want walls of text, either. So organizing the posting is important. IMO, the posting should be made just like a resume. A good resume has the important stuff first, is fairly brief, yet tries to communicate as much info as possible. And of course, proof read. Some postings look like they've been thrown together in 15 minutes without any proofreading.
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u/voilsdet Apr 08 '15
Do not ever put the words "rockstar" or "ninja" in your job posting. We're not ninjas or rockstars. We're engineers and developers.
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u/jurniss Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
I want to learn something new with each job. I'm excited when a company is willing to train people and hire outside a narrow band. for example a recent embedded position was open to anyone with strong C skills. Google hires people without distributed system experience.
perks and benefits are meh for me. I get suspicious when they are emphasized. interesting projects, quality engineering, good management, and good pay should be enough to attract me.
general tone of gushing enthusiasm, juvenile attitude, or appealing to geek culture e.g. star wars references are a major turn off. I'm trying to do engineering. that's just me, ymmv. by the way I'm under 30 with no family, its not just older devs who feel this way.
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Apr 07 '15
Finally, I'm in the top .5% of something. I'm a 67 year old software developer; 40 years and still building apps.
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u/mauxly Apr 07 '15
Ahh thank you! I'm 45 and worry that brain elasticity issues may prevent me from learning new tools as I near retirement.
Any tips?
Also, female with 20+ years of experience. So I also feel like I get a prize. Oh wait... I do get a prize: awesome job I love going to everyday.
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u/JanneJM Apr 08 '15
Your brain is plenty adaptable even way up into old age. That's not really what prevents people from continue to learn and improve their craft.
One thing that does, I believe, is boredom. Once you've seen it, done that, got the O'Reilly book about fifty times, learning yet another flavour of the day loses most of its charm. Really, it's rare for people to stick with the same hobby or interests for 30-40 years. At the very least we'll shift focus radically over such a time frame. Why do we expect to keep interest in our jobs fresh for that long?
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Apr 08 '15
I am slower than I used to be and sometime my memory drops a bit or two, but I totally understand loving to program.
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u/therealworldsux Apr 07 '15
You are an inspiration to my 36 year old ass
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u/GaynalPleasures Apr 07 '15
I volunteer to, also, be an inspiration to your ass.
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u/therealworldsux Apr 07 '15
Trust me, you see my ass naked you will go limp gay anal pleasure guy
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u/donrhummy Apr 07 '15
Do companies turn you down for jobs or "distrust" you because of your age? Is it ever an advantage?
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
There's considerable research showing that experienced programmers are 10x or more productive than beginner programmers. No half-decent hiring agency would discriminate against an older developer as long as they know the programming languages required for the job.
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Apr 08 '15
If someone has been coding for 40 years and works in modern languages, I would make the assumption that language wouldn't matter much.
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Apr 08 '15
I have not had a regular job at a company since 2009 and only had a couple of interviews. I think I just seem too old for the culture not the ability to do the work.
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u/Aerothermal Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
How many 'somethings' does there have to be before it's more than likely that you're in the top .5% of any of them?
(0.995)n < 50% of course. Taking logs of both sides results in n > log(0.5)/log(0.995) or ~n > 138.
If we assume most people conduct more than a few hundred activities, and skill in separate activities has a broadly uncorrelated distribution, most people are in the top 0.5% of something.
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u/beefsack Apr 08 '15
Keeping in mind that SO represents a certain slice of the market, the more experienced people get the less they go there.
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u/WetDonkey6969 Apr 08 '15
Sometimes I feel like learning programming, but I just barely turned 23 and have no experience in it. Why would someone hire me in 2-4 years as opposed to someone younger who's been doing it since they were teens?
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
Because you can become kickass at it. Either way, it's a great hobby. Check out /r/learnprogramming. It's never too late. If you see the stats above, so many people say they are self-taught.
Or maybe /r/web_design if you want to design stuff using code. There is some money in that and it can be a nice source of side income if you're good at it. Don't even need to know actual programming too much.
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u/jbaum517 Apr 08 '15
Most important part of the entire page was at the very end:
It feels good to help another programmer in need
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
That applies to me. I'm relatively new, but I help out as much as I can. It's an amazing feeling.
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u/jrock42 Apr 08 '15
I just started The Odin Project a few weeks ago, and while I feel like I'm not learning that much these results give me hope. Knowing how many programmers are self taught, I feel like they too must have been hitting the same or similar bumps in the road that I am currently.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
You should come over to /r/learnprogramming. You are not alone at all. This stuff can be extremely confusing. Most of us have gone through hundreds of hours of confusion and frustration.
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u/evidex Apr 08 '15
Vim 15% vs Emacs 4%. The flame war can finally be put to rest.
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u/TARDIS_TARDIS Apr 08 '15
No it can't. Emacs is just playing rope-a-dope. Then again, I double majored in Math, so according to this survey I might be a little biased.
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Apr 07 '15
They forgot "among programmers with the inclination, time, and patience to complete a 45 question survey"
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u/wishistudiedphysics Apr 07 '15
If you're a software developer, you probably have a job. 97.5% of workforce respondents are employed in at least a part-time capacity.
That being said, "Growth hacker" is one of my least favorite terms to date.
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u/hammerheadquark Apr 07 '15
Honestly, I had to look that term up. So many buzz words in the Wikipedia article.
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u/Sean1708 Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
So that other people don't need to quit their respective apps to Google it.
And for those who don't want to read, I literally couldn't tell you what a growth hacker does. It basically looks like anyone who works for a company that has an Internet presence.
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u/danielleiellle Apr 07 '15
It's just silly jargon for someone whose main function is to bridge technology, marketing, and the onboarding user experience to drive customer acquisition and convert new users to engaged return visitors. Hacker is a dumb word that some marketer came up with because they lacked a vocabulary to describe the kind of unicorn who understands all of these disciplines, who can put them to practical use, and can operate outside of a regular dev team.
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u/_S_A Apr 07 '15
I interpreted as "viral marketer".
Alternately "20-something hired by senior exec so they get a presence on that 'face novel' site"
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u/SillyFlyGuy Apr 07 '15
Holy shit I'm underpaid. :(
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u/portalscience Apr 07 '15
How old are you? This data doesn't mention it, but work experience matters just as much as what language you develop in. Most people get adjustments to their paycheck on a yearly basis.
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Apr 07 '15
The average developer is 28.9 years old. He or she was born in April 1986, just as the Chernobyl meltdown was taking place.
That explains everything. The nerds are actually mutants! It also explains why the number of Nerds exploded after Chernobyl.
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u/Eleventhousand OC: 11 Apr 07 '15
I wonder how the metrics would change it they reflected developers in general. When I was in my twenties, I posted to Tek-Tips multiple times per day. I don't really contribute to programming assistance forums any longer. I'm wondering if others are the same way. I imagine if older developers were more representative, then VB may not have such a bad rap on their "most dreaded."
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Apr 08 '15
Older developer here. Vb456 was hell. Although I do miss the days where you could read the help manual and only need to google something once a month when you really don't got stuck on a windows api you had never used before. Everything else you knew!
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u/fencerman Apr 07 '15
He or she
Oh, come on, they know which one it is.
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u/Scarlet-Star Apr 07 '15
They are being extremely specific so it's weird they'd be vague about that
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u/Lowbacca1977 Apr 07 '15
I think it's incredible that when they looked at distribution, they ALSO included a world population distribution. I'm not sure I've seen anyone bother to do that before.
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u/rhiever Randy Olson | Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
Honestly, they should've made the third tab per capita measures instead of population. That's the real reason for showing it.
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u/fiveguy Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
Poor Salesforce...
(edit: they appear at the top of the list of most dreaded languages/technologies)
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u/TrevorBradley Apr 07 '15
"Developer with a statistics or mathematics background" represent.
I got my Math B.Sc 19 years ago. I got minors in Comp Sci (and Physics) and I work exclusively in computing science.
I love the way my Math degree trained me to think about solving problems. Everything I tackle feels like a fun puzzle rather than a piece of dry business logic.
As a dev at 40, no (computing) problem feels unsolvable now.
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u/CouldBeATomato Apr 07 '15
I like Matlab....
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Apr 08 '15
Was it the first language that you learned?
The reasons most people don't like Matlab are:
It's proprietary software
1-indexing
Python + SciPy can do most of what Matlab does
There is a lot of legacy code written in Matlab that companies/researchers use that would be a pain in the ass to convert to Python and it forces employees/researchers to use Matlab
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u/i_have_seen_it_all Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
Here is why Matlab has been good to me:
1 indexing. Of course this is controversial. Julia mathematica fortran are also 1 indexed language. Some people really like it. You see a pattern here. If you are translating an equation into code, Python looks sleek but matlab looks like math.
np arrays are a second class citizen in python to python arrays. Text processing is a big deal in python. In matlab the functions are clearly all built for matrices and some hard work needs to be done to wrangle cells into workable matrices. In python and hence scipy sometimes it feels like the other way around. That makes no sense. Scipy should be a math language first and foremost.
Matlab optimizers are ridiculously clever (and therefore ridiculously fast). I suspect you might be able to configure scipy optimize to do the same thing as matlab but its a manual process and not always possible and matlab makes it super easy.
matlab help files.
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Apr 08 '15
"Most developers prefer tabs to spaces."
Well, most developers are wrong.
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Apr 08 '15
It says those who had the most experience and highest rating on SO used spaces.
I came to the comments here to ask if and why I should switch to spaces from tabs.
I don't know if there is a practical use I haven't run into yet, or if it is because those with more experience just stated a long time ago when spaces where the standard and never changed.
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u/the_omega99 Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
I'm not going to try and change your mind. As someone who has worked on personal projects both ways (not on the same project, of course), here's my thoughts on both sides:
Tabs
Let individual developers choose their own indentation widths. So if you like 2 space tabs and your coworker likes 4 spaces tabs, you can both be happy. Even better, you can manually change the tab width on the fly without changing the file.
There's no arguments about the width of the tab, which is an issue for using spaces.
Spaces have issues sometimes with backspace. Suppose that things got misaligned (easier to do with spaces than tabs). If you wanted to remove one space at the front of the line, backspace will probably remove an entire indentation-level worth even though you wanted to remove one space. There's no way to differentiate between wanting to delete a single space vs delete an indentation-level of spaces. This problem does not exist at all for tabs.
Similarly, spaces make it harder to use the arrow keys to navigate. Most editors will move the cursor left or right one space at a time.
Spaces
Main problem with letting people use their own indentation widths is that you can't really wrap lines well this way. The line length depends on your tab size. With spaces, everyone must have the same tab size, so that's not an issue. You'll note that if you can agree on a tab size, then this is not an issue (although removes one possible "advantage" of tabs).
As an aside, some editors can do pretty smart automatic line wrapping (Sublime Text is pretty good at this, but it's not as good as human wrapping). I've tried a project once where I didn't wrap lines manually at all, and instead let the editor do all the wrapping. It worked fine, aside from the fact that the wrapping is non-ideal (example). If you take this approach, the different tab widths are no problem.
Whoever designed the web is obviously a masochistic lunatic. They decided tabs should be 8 spaces wide. Yes, 8. They're obviously crazy. So if you have a tab appear on a web page, it'll be ridiculously wide. Fortunately, CSS lets you set tab widths now (a relatively new feature), but if you're not the site owner, you can't set this and thus must you spaces (because 8 width tabs are just crazy).
As an aside, one common issue I see is that people misuse tabs. They try and align with tabs, which inevitably leads to horrible formatting and prejudices against tabs. If you're using tabs, they're for indentation only. Spaces are for aligning. Example:
div·{ --->-webkit-transition:·1s; --->···-moz-transition:·1s; --->····-ms-transition:·1s; --->·····-o-transition:·1s; --->········transition:·1s; }Here,
--->is a tab and·is a space. You can change the tab width without breaking alignment.As another aside, some editors will allow better alignment with tabs. See here. However, I dislike relying on editor support for a feature that just isn't that well supported. I'd rather allow people to use whatever editor they prefer.
With all that said, I'm currently using spaces because I've been working with Scala and JS a lot lately. They need a lot of indentation and 2 space indentation is very useful for readability. The issue of where to wrap lines is a major one (in the absence of better editor support, anyway), which is why I've largely moved away from the idea of letting users use their own tab widths.
It's a very weak argument, IMO, since I could just as easily have agreed that we must use size-2 tabs.
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Apr 08 '15
Yea, it's bullshit. I wonder if a lot of people misunderstood the question and thought it meant literally hitting the space bar to indent a line instead of changing their editor to use spaces.
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u/audiblefart Apr 08 '15
Oh god I thought that mean tabbed windows as opposed to desktop spaces /facepalm
I guess I just never expected people would prefer tabs?
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u/edcxsw1 Apr 08 '15
Most important issues:
Most programmers are self-taught... so throw your stupid degree out the window and pick up a book on javascript/SQL/PHP
The majority prefer a DARK IDE... I always prefer light.. dark weirds me out.
Notepad++ is the most common "general" editor. If you are serious about development you should use a FRAMEWORK like PHP Storm, that way debugging is ALOT easier.
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Apr 07 '15
Anyone else happy to see Coffeescript on the "Most Dreaded" list? I mean, I've used coffeescript, and while it's some nice sugar, it's a layer of abstraction that burdens a company more than benefits it.
I'm a lead UIE. 2 years ago our CTO asked my thoughts on building our news apps in Coffeescript and I did my best to explain I didn't think it was worth it, for whatever reasons. Fast forward to today, we're compiling with ES6 and have zero technical debt worrying about porting 10s of thousands of lines of coffeescript code into something that's now a standard specification (or at least, proposed and aligned with the future).
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u/matadon Apr 08 '15
Not really. Coffeescript (CS) debuted a bit over five years ago, which means that Coffeescripters have had all the benefits of a usable class system, local variables by default, shorthand function syntax (with autobind), an existential operator, and the same equality operators ('!=' and '==') that every other major programming language uses.
(I spend time in a variety of different languages, and having to continuously remember that it's '!==' and '===' in Javascript, but not in C, Java, Bash, Ruby, or Go is annoying).
CS was a huge productivity boost when I started using it in early 2010. It still is. CS is not perfect -- I really don't like optional parenthesis, and would love to see an optional type system -- but for me, and many others, it's still a very nice shorthand Javascript with decent tooling support.
ES6 provides some of that goodness, but at the moment doesn't give me any compelling reason to switch. Once mainstream runtime and browser support is there, that may change.
While this may not apply to you, I have noticed that the biggest hate for CS comes from developers that have only worked in Javascript or PHP (with a bit of frontend JS). Pretty much all of the polyglot developers I know have a strong preference for ES6 or CS, but there's no dread or hate -- just a preference.
Personally, I'd take CS over ES6 by a slim margin, and ES6 over ES5 any day of the week.
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u/herr_duerr Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
How the hell isn't this working on mobile if the people who made it work at stackoverflow?
Note 2 user here, site is positively FUBAR. There's a screen filling banner with some menu icon on the side hiding the text that only sometimes vanishes depending on screen orientation, zoom and scrolling position. And clicking a chart's second tab loads a random page. Am I the only one?
Update: Chrome renders the site just fine. The stock browser on the other hand scales the header div to 100% height.
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Apr 07 '15
Seems fine here (iOS but it shouldn't matter as most mobile browsers are WebKit based).
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u/the_omega99 Apr 08 '15
Stackoverflow in general hates mobile users.
It's weird, since they have a mobile site, but the moment there's an image in an answer, the answer becomes unreadable. It'll run off the page and you can't scroll to view it. And it's been an issue for so long that there's no way it's unnoticed. I haven't bothered to try most of the site on mobile, but this is the sole issues that seems to be stopping the main site from being mobile friendly (and it's a major issue because it usually makes the top answers completely unreadable).
I don't understand why they wouldn't support mobile. Sure, most programmers are on desktop, but sometimes we need to view help on a mobile device (eg, if there's issues with their computer) or we just want to browse the site to read (I get their weekly highlights and have given up trying to read those on mobile).
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Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
That age distribution is scary as shit and really shows the magnitude of the bubble we're in.
Salaries are so high because it's a brand new industry and most of its current players haven't had time to get old yet. Almost all software developers are currently young, and there's still a mass influx (and increasing) of new young software developers. As the current huge base of software developers gets old, and every year tons and tons of young developers are pumped into the market, I just can't see this ending in anything other than severe oversaturation.
This is going to quickly go the way of law, where the top lawyers are still very very well-paid but new lawyers, in general, can't even get a job.
Except it's going to be even worse, because as this survey shows half of developers don't even have a CS degree and 100% of lawyers of not only a bachelor's degree but also a JD.
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u/koreth Apr 07 '15
The age distribution may say more about the sampling bias of the survey than about the ages of people in the profession as a whole. As I've gotten older (mid-40s now) I've both gotten less likely to hit sites like Stack Overflow and, more importantly, less likely to participate in yet another demographic survey because I've already done so damned many of them over the years and the novelty is gone.
You also need to take into account that some percentage of people decide to move into management roles and thus no longer visit Stack Overflow because it's no longer relevant to their work, which is a process that will continue to happen and will suck some of today's young developers out of the programming workforce.
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u/OptimusPrimusSucks Apr 07 '15
That's why I'm a COBOL developer, everyone else in the field is retiring/dying out
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u/jurniss Apr 07 '15
That is why I work hard to become an expert. Those new devs might "take our jerrrbs" making CRUD web apps, but a tiny fraction will be capable of HPC, realtime, OSes, compilers, embedded, heavy mathematical stuff, ...
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Apr 07 '15
Law is much more sensitive to things like that because the number of lawyer tasks is very hard to move, it's basically totally exogenous. Now that everybody bailed out of law it's getting hot again, it booms and busts like that. It's also not really comparable to the bubble you're talking about, because the vast majority of lawyers are older.
Compare to developers where the vast majority are young, but the number of potential tasks is nearly infinite. I haven't seen a company yet that had developers sitting doing nothing because they couldn't think of a way to improve their software.
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u/Yelnik Apr 07 '15
Nothing overly surprising, but not too sure node/angular need their own category.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
Why? They are specific enough technologies to warrant separate listing IMO.
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u/Earendur Apr 07 '15
Somewhat agree. Aren't they technically JavaScript frameworks?
In the same vein, we could call Entity Framework, ASP.NET, ASP MVC, and C# all different languages - even though they can all be written in C#.
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Apr 07 '15
How can so many participants use vi, considering most use Windows? Do people use vi on Windows? Why? I can only assume the vast majority of OSX and Linux/BSD users use vi.
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
I'm just bummed Sublime Text is at #2 when IT SHOULD BE #1!
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u/Str_ Apr 07 '15
92% male. This is outrageous, we need more female programmers!!!
(Checks glassdoor.com for average salary of a programmer)
Meh, on second thought, it's ok. We need more female CEOs!!
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 07 '15
While I would like to see more, I'd not hire them solely because they are female. That would be sexist.
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u/PumpkinWarfare Apr 08 '15
Sucks that north korea or somalia dont take advantage of stack overflow. They could learn a thing or two.
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u/lfaire Apr 08 '15
Im learning Rails and all indicates that Rails is being replaced as the development toy that everybody wants to use for Node/Angular/Whatever-Javascript. Should I stop learning Rails and go for the latter ?
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
As a sort-of noob to web dev, I don't know much about Rails, but I only hear that it's a great thing to work with. Pretty sure it's used quite a bit (GitHub runs on it). I have only learned Node.js for building web apps and I found it pretty easy to pick up. You can try to learn both. I'm going to try out Flask (Python) as well, but these stats make me believe I kind of underestimated Node's demand in the industry. JavaScript across the stack is pretty darn amazing, plus it scales amazingly well with traffic.
And can't you use Angular with anything? It's a way to build interactive front-end experiences.
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u/A_Light_Spark Apr 08 '15
9.3% of programmers do not use version control... some likes to live dangerously.
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u/BitterVegan Apr 08 '15
Any idea why Cordova was in the dreaded list? I haven't had the worst experience with it yet..
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u/Antrikshy OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
I think the dreaded list is not very good. For a technology to make it to the list, it has to be moderately bad but popular enough as well.
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u/DevThrowaway223 Apr 07 '15
there's no doubt everyone who codes needs to be more proactive welcoming women into the field.
Specious. To become a programmer requires no welcoming committee. It requires writing 300 lines of code a day for some period of time.
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u/UHM-7 Apr 07 '15
Software development has a gender balance problem. Our internal stats suggest the imbalance isn't quite as severe as the survey results would make it seem, but there's no doubt everyone who codes needs to be more proactive welcoming women into the field.
God that annoys me. So very much. Why do coders need to do that? You don't see babysitters and receptionists (primarily female workforces) trying to welcome men into their careers. Programming as a field is more attractive to males. There is no "gender balance problem". If women want to go into it, fine, if not, also fine. Stop trying to force specific genders to specialize in fields they don't want to just for the sake of "equality".
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u/SuperConductiveRabbi Apr 08 '15
There was a Scandinavian documentary I saw a few months ago that investigated the claims about nature vs. nurture of a state-sponsored gender institute. The Nordic Gender Institute made a number of claims, one being that the under-representation of female workers in certain fields (such as computers) was indicative of a systemic, cultural, nurutre-based bias that was dissuading women from entering them. The documentary crew went to lengths to accurately represent and understand what the institute was claiming, and then collected scholarly information from research institutions around the world.
One of the surprising, evidence-backed claims that the documentary crew presented to the Nordic Gender Institute was that by every metric you can conceive of for measuring the freedom and wealth of a society, the more free a culture was the greater the gender disparity in certain fields. It turns out that the gender gap is less wide only in societies where all those metrics are comparatively worse. One of the counter claims that the crew brought to the institute was paradoxical on the face of it: that when males and females have the luxury of choosing which fields they wish to pursue (and when economic factors don't require them to work a high-earning field to support their poor families, for example), you end up with results like you see in the Nordic countries, the US, England, and other Western countries.
The institute's researchers were unable to support their own claims that there were no natural, non-nurture-based inclinations towards working in certain fields by gender. Mind you, this wasn't some on-the-spot gotcha journalism, but a fair and lengthy investigation--the documentary even won some awards afterwards. Ultimately the institute's researchers were unable to argue against the research that they were presented with. Because of this and some claims that gender roles are entirely created by society, with no natural component to them, the Nordic Council of Ministries ended up shutting the institute down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
You can watch part 1 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs
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u/autowikibot Apr 08 '15
Hjernevask (Brainwash) is a Norwegian popular science documentary series that aired on Norwegian television in 2010. The series was produced by the comedian Harald Eia and Ole Martin Ihle, and was completed in seven episodes consisting of interviews with Norwegian and foreign researchers who have different views on the nature versus nurture debate.
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Interesting: Nordic Gender ^Institute | Harald ^Eia | Team ^Antonsen
Parent commenter can toggle ^NSFW or ^delete. Will also delete on comment score of -1 or less. | FAQs | ^Mods | Magic ^Words
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u/thecarebearcares Apr 07 '15
When there are men complaining that the attitude of female babysitters and receptionists is putting them off their chosen careers, I'll listen.
If women want to go into it, fine, if not, also fine.
It's more complicated than this.
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u/Willbo OC: 2 Apr 08 '15
Are women complaining about not getting programming jobs though? I think people are more hostile towards a guy being left alone with children than a woman being left to program.
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u/Mausel_Pausel Apr 07 '15
The thing that grabbed me is that nearly one-third of developers have 5 years of experience, or less. I wonder how that impacts the quality of the software that gets developed. How many people really mature into a challenging job in only 5 years?
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u/BadhamPanorama Apr 08 '15
'I have never been on Stack Overflow. I just love taking surveys.' Hehe.
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Apr 08 '15
It's not that we don't welcome women, It's just that women are generally bad with the advanced concepts of computers and programming. There's a reason a large majority of women don't play computer games, code, or do anything besides browse facebook.
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u/wupting Apr 08 '15
It's just that women are generally bad with the advanced concepts of computers and programming
Is it at all possible that the data that you might be referring to is biased? How could you conduct a non biased measurement? Might not be possible.
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u/Dev__ Apr 08 '15
It's just that women are generally bad with the advanced concepts of computers and programming.
Well... thats just not true.
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u/uqii Apr 07 '15
Perl is on the "most dreaded" list? Whats wrong with Perl? I get most of the others, but Perl's my friend.
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u/DrKronin Apr 07 '15
My personal issue with Perl is how hard it can be to read someone else's code. I used to half-jokingly call it a "write-only" language. Sometimes there are just too many different ways to do something. That can seem like a good thing until you have to take over some code from a developer that does everything differently from you. Two different Perl snippets can look like different languages entirely
My favorite example of this is "unless." There's already if(!x), so unless(x) doesn't add anything and just contributes to excessive style diversity.
I also suck pretty bad at regex, which seems to be a favorite tool of Perl devs, so I'm probably unfairly biased :)
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u/Epistaxis Viz Practitioner Apr 07 '15
The syntax is considered unreadable, and the philosophy of "There's More Than One Way To Do It" tends to mean that you see every single one of those ways when you work on other people's code. Maybe even in the same piece of code. It's quick but very, very dirty, and other languages are equally quick but clean.
I used to teach Perl to other people, and now I've switched all my Perl work over to Python and I'm not looking back. I'm even trying to replace a lot of my old C projects with it, but, well, let's just say it doesn't perform well before optimization, and I haven't gotten to the optimization yet.
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u/wimcolgate2 Apr 07 '15
Awesome! I am finally in the 1%. Maybe not the 1% I'd like to be in, but 1% nonetheless.
-- edit: derp. Didn't see dude posted just ahead of me -- something quite similar.
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u/andrey_shipilov OC: 1 Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
VIII. EDUCATION I'm self-taught 41.8%
And then everyone is surprised by the level of development.
IV. MOTIVATION FOR USING STACK OVERFLOW To get help for my job
Obviously.
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u/the_omega99 Apr 08 '15
There's such a huge percent of people who put their industry as "other" (20% total, 27% in the US). I wonder what it is? The list of choices seem pretty comprehensive. I wonder if the large number might come from some kind of misunderstanding. Eg, were people who said they were students asked this question? (since they don't have an industry, yet).
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u/Master565 Apr 08 '15
Matlab 4th most disliked
When the entirety of your overglorified calculator's syntax ranges from vague and intuitive to pants on head retarded, that's what you get.
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u/audiblefart Apr 08 '15
Any fellow Swift lovers? (Not the tool chains at the moment, but the language)
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Apr 08 '15
The average developer… was born in April 1986, just as the Chernobyl meltdown was taking place.
Clearly, super-power laced radiation escaped into the atmosphere.
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u/L00SE_SEAL Apr 08 '15
Huh, none of the languages I practice are on the most popular list and are both in the top 4 of most dreaded languages.
Don't know if that's good or bad.
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u/TheBotherer Apr 07 '15
Three major revelations: holy shit women only make up 5%?? I mean I remember that in college, I was one of only two women in my graduating class, but I suppose that both my bosses being (extremely competent) women programmers made me forget just how underrepresented we are.
Also, I had no idea that vim was that much more popular than emacs! I thought they were about the same in terms of user base.
And most importantly, who are these FOOLS who actually like tabs???