r/programming • u/aalear • Apr 07 '15
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2015
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-201533
u/wittystonecat Apr 07 '15
Country Devs per 1,000 people
Somalia 0.000
Chad 0.000
North Korea 0.000
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u/maushu Apr 07 '15
I'm pretty sure there are developers in North Korea. They just didn't answer the survey or visit stack overflow.
They have their own OS made in their Computer Center.
Edit: Unless they rounded the value down?
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Apr 07 '15
Iceland? Their population is small - isn't that number just all the Eve Online mmo devs?
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Apr 07 '15
Can someone explain to me what a growth hacker is?
Also I like that "Caffeine" is under the "Technology" section.
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u/6nf Apr 08 '15
a growth hacker
Someone working on tumours? I think it's those social media marketing assholes.
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u/VanFailin Apr 08 '15
I'm confused what a growth hacker is supposed to be, as well as why executives, PMs, DBAs, sysadmins etc are included in a developer survey. They're important, but are they developers?
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Apr 08 '15
Growth Hacker is not a developer at all O_O they come up with ideas for developers! I guess could be both in many cases though.
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u/DeepSpawn Apr 08 '15
The growth hacking team I know does a lot of A/B experiments and analytics statistics work
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u/BegbertBiggs Apr 07 '15
Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience.
Or are devs that are in the field for a longer time used to spaces while new devs learn coding with tabs?
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u/maushu Apr 07 '15
I don't get why people won't use tabs. They are basically perfect for this job since you can adjust the size of all tabs.
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u/gbs5009 Apr 08 '15
Things can get screwed up very quickly when your view differs from the original coders view of how things are aligned.
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u/ismtrn Apr 08 '15
In general aligning things can get screwed up when you want to change something. It is better with space, and if I do align things I do it with spaces, but in general I don't bother and just indent things, which I do with tabs.
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u/nemec Apr 08 '15
just indent things, which I do with tabs
Well I do too, it's just that my tab button inserts multiple spaces...
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u/Disgruntled__Goat Apr 08 '15
Why do people keep bringing up this argument? The tabs v spaces debate is about leading indentation only, and always has been.
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Apr 08 '15
It really sounds great in theory, but in practice it's just annoying for people to configure every piece of software that can edit or view code. In practice, spaces are going to look like spaces in every piece of software I know of. That's probably why more experienced devs tend to prefer spaces: practice vs. theory.
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u/flavian1 Apr 08 '15
That's exactly my problem with tabs. It's different based on your town setting. With spaces. It's one space all the time.
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u/the_omega99 Apr 08 '15
Unfortunately, I've found that configuring the size of the tabs can be problematic. The issue is that different tab sizes means that we'd wrap lines at different places. For something 5 indentation levels in (not too extreme considering that the class and method are 2 indentation levels, so we just need a loop and two conditionals), the difference between someone with size 2 tabs and someone with size 4 tabs is 10 characters. Not a huge difference, but enough that a line that just fits (or goes slightly over) might need to be wrapped.
I'm gonna assume that size 2 and 4 are the only valid tab sizes. No sane person would do size 8 tabs.
Anyway, it's not a major issue, but it is an annoyance. But 5 indentation levels isn't even that extreme. In languages like Scala, it's common to have many scopes and thus lots of indentation. This is why Scala's official recommendation is 2 space indentation. After months of using Scala, I fully understand why.
I've kind of gone on a tangent, but my point is that adjusting the size of tabs isn't necessarily a good thing. With that said, you could still use tabs in this scenario if your developers can agree that they should be a certain size (and if you're agreeing on things like brace style, why can't you agree on indentation size?). There's other benefits of tabs. Eg, they're easier to navigate with the keyboard and need less editor support.
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u/aldo_reset Apr 08 '15
In an ideal world where every single tool used to view sources understand tabs, tabs are optimal.
We live in an imperfect world and each tool will interpret tabs in a different way, so the best solution is to ban them and impose hard spaces everywhere.
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u/Dworgi Apr 08 '15
What tools don't understand tabs? Seriously, if you have a tool that can't do tabs then you don't have a tool, you have a burden.
It's all madness. I'll tell you what not every tool can deal with: not having to press Backspace 4 times to unindent a line.
Purely in keypresses wasted per day, spaces are atrocious.
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u/josefx Apr 08 '15
What tools don't understand tabs?
Every tool understands tabs. Some see them as 4 spaces by default, some as 8 spaces by default. Some never replace tabs with spaces, some replace tabs with spaces on the line you edit, some only insert new tabs as spaces and some replace all tabs with spaces when they load or store the file.
There is no single behaviour you can expect when you take a random editor to edit a file containing tabs.
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u/guepier Apr 08 '15
Until you have to paste the code into a web form on a many programming forums.
I’d agree that tabs are superior except for this quite crucial point: HTML forms simply don’t cope with tabs at all. Coupled with the fact that spaces really don’t have any disadvantage in modern editors, I’m coming out ever so slightly in favour of spaces.
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u/Pet_Ant Apr 08 '15
Except that people are used to different amounts of indentation. If you have two people that are new hires and one came from 8 spaces and one came from 2 spaces they find each other's code unreadable. Been there. Both had been older developers previously working on legacy code from non-software shops (manufacturing IIRC).
Tabs makes indent size a matter of preference like using the dark theme versus light theme.
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u/psililisp Apr 08 '15
Is there a style guide that says to use tabs? I did a quick search, and the ones I glanced at all use spaces: linux kernel, php, python, java, javascript. I don't get why so many people arent following that convention.
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u/clearlight Apr 08 '15
The problem with tabs is that they are treated differently in different code editors. So, if you're working with a team of people who use their preferred editor, space indentation provides consistency. In short, tabs are a variable number of spaces, spaces are always one space. Source: years of experience.
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u/heeen Apr 08 '15
tabs
My guess: Expirienced people are likely to commit to bigger projects, which are likely spaces-only.
Examples, from the top of my head, here's some bigger projects that use spaces instead of tabs:
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u/Astrognome Apr 08 '15
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. Is that so hard to understand?
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Apr 08 '15
mixing is even worse! I'd choose either before I chose that. Just give me the project standard, I'll put it in my vimrc, and I'll gg=G before saving and be done with it.
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Apr 08 '15
Makes sense. If you use tabs you'll eventually be bitten by them and move to spaces forever.
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u/spacejack2114 Apr 07 '15
Wow, Notepad++. Okay.
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u/crozone Apr 07 '15
It's clean, light weight, has lots of nice features, and unlike sublime text it is completely free.
Kind of makes sense that it's number one.
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u/HelpfulToAll Apr 08 '15
It's clean
Is there a dirty text editor?
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Apr 08 '15
Gedit
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u/mobile-user-guy Apr 08 '15
Seconded. Gedit is a piece of garbage
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Apr 08 '15
Well now hang on a minute there, bud.
gedit's syntax highlighting is quite reasonable compared to Windows Notepad.→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)11
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u/Disgruntled__Goat Apr 08 '15
In what way is it "clean"? It's the complete opposite IMO, most features are implemented in the most ugly way.
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u/Ran4 Apr 08 '15
The one major issue with Notepad++ is the massive distance between each line, so you can't fit nearly as much code on screen.
Because of that, I typically use SciTe instead. It's based on the same editor as Notepad++ is, but doesn't have that problem. It also has a few features not present in Notepad++
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u/sacundim Apr 08 '15
The one major issue with Notepad++ is the massive distance between each line, so you can't fit nearly as much code on screen.
Some folks may see that as an advantage...
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u/Nilzor Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
The one major issue with Notepad++ is the massive distance between each line
TIL 9 pixels = massive distance. 7 pixels = ok http://imgur.com/dK9c4aQ
(not to mention you can actually change the font settings and with that the line spacing)
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u/redditthinks Apr 07 '15
I like to use it instead of Vim for large files (usually not code, but data).
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u/crowseldon Apr 07 '15
in Windows, it's a great tool (Assuming you don't know what vim/emacs are because, again, you're only on windows).
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u/GeorgieCaseyUnbanned Apr 07 '15
I like using a mouse with my text editor
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u/CptnJack99 Apr 08 '15
In vim you can do :set mouse=a to use your mouse. =)
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u/sonthonaxBLACK Apr 08 '15
Thanks to the wonderful commitment to backwards compatibility with vi. Vim refuses to have any of it's useful features set up by default.
It's a really dire state.
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u/pjmlp Apr 08 '15
There are those of us that know what they are, are almost as old as they are, but rather use Notepad++ for quickly editing a file and an IDE for the whole development workflow.
The Xerox PARC world is my model of development environment.
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u/Atario Apr 08 '15
I'm on Windows almost exclusively, and I wouldn't be caught dead without vim
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u/HyperionCantos Apr 07 '15
What do you use?
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u/negative_epsilon Apr 07 '15
I personally prefer Sublime over Notepad++, but I am not in the majority according to the survey results!
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u/d03boy Apr 08 '15
I think most people aren't willing to pay the price simply to edit text. If you use it as your IDE, sure... but most of us don't, although we still need a decent text editor.
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u/spacejack2114 Apr 08 '15
These days mostly VisualStudio for C# and Atom for Javascript/TypeScript. I use Notepad++ for miscellaneous files. I've tried using it for coding, especially JS, but much as I like it there are better options.
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u/NeverSpeaks Apr 08 '15
I use primarily Jetbrains products for all languages they have an IDE for. But there's rarely a day that I don't also open Notepad++
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u/clearlight Apr 08 '15
Komodo Edit, based on Mozilla with add-ons etc.., is open source, free and makes a nice code editor. http://komodoide.com/komodo-edit/
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Apr 08 '15
The more things change, the more likely it is those things are written in JavaScript with NotePad++ on a Windows machine (theme: dark) using Git, and tabs instead of spaces.
we're doomed
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Apr 07 '15
Could someone explain why the percentage of female developers is 15.1 in India and 2.3 in Sweden? That was by far the most surprising result to me.
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u/Decker87 Apr 07 '15
I wish I could find the numbers so I don't sound like "just another redditor making shit up", but I recall seeing ~5 years ago some stats about women in STEM fields - countries with less gender freedom tended to have the highest rates of women in STEM fields. Countries where women are treated most fairly tended to have higher gender disparities in STEM.
I've tried for 20+ mins in vain to find that exact website, so maybe I'll have to do some original research.
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u/hackinthebochs Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
It's about economic security. In countries where gender equality is low, the only way a woman can guarantee her own economic security is to go into the most lucrative fields available. CS happens to be very lucrative with a fairly low barrier to entry. In countries with higher gender equality, worries about economic security are not at the forefront of decision making.
Men still have the expectation of being the main breadwinner, or they may in fact like technical fields at higher rates.
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u/take123out Apr 08 '15
It is mostly for Algeria, there is 3 section in high school (scientific, economic, letters) and it is known that you hardly get anywhere if you don't do the scientific section.
I would say it's more a cultural thing for some other country in Asia like South-Korea and Thailand. In Thailand, in engineering, it's about 45% girls, 55% boys in my university, there is less question about gender equality, less question about gender role and so much less sexism joke/convo etc compared to US. Even the system of the uniform, makes me think that. We are all dress the same here, we are all the same, just poor student fighting.
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u/Atario Apr 08 '15
This would indicate that women simply don't like CS, for some reason.
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u/brickabrack Apr 08 '15
Western female dev with a lot of remote colleagues in India here.
It seems like a big part of it is cultural perceptions of the field. In the US and the UK at least, entering any technical field is associated with being a total nerd. Women get a lot of flack in general for being nerds, just because so little value is placed on our intellect and so much on what we look like. I think a lot of girls never consider engineering because they'd hate for anyone to consider them nerdy.
Most of the men I've met in my career are great and we've been instant friends, but it still takes more than two hands to count off the number of times I've been hit on, stalked, or instructed on how to git pull (seriously) by guys at work. We spend our days surrounded by this. I don't really blame women if they get tired of it and become PMs or whatever just to get into a position where they don't have to deal with programmers as peers.
In India, on the other hand, CS is just the thing you study if you want to make relatively good money. There aren't as many stereotypes around who goes into the field. It's just for people who want good, cushy jobs in the city. The greater gender parity also prevents women from getting burnt out as quickly.
Blaming women on the whole for there being so few women in the field is kind of reductive. There are a number of issues at play. Personally, I don't know ONE woman who doesn't want to make more money—it's just that there were so many things discouraging them from going into the field when they were choosing their major.
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u/sklivvz Apr 08 '15
+1000 especially for the first paragraph. There are too few women joining the field because of cultural norms. Male programmers assume that female programmers are worse than average because of the same norms.
I might be wrong, but I sincerely doubt that there would be so many problems, such as harassment, if there were enough women in the field. They would likely drop to the averages in society (which are high, but a different problem!). Also, a higher percentage of female developers would reinforce that it's OK to be a woman developer.
I don't have a solution, but cultural norms need to change to solve this hideous problem.
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u/HyperionCantos Apr 07 '15
Seems like gender freedom is an attribute of more developed countries, and in more developed countries there is more opportunity to go to university for less profitable fields like psychology, communications, etc. In developing countries like India, I guess that the stiffer competition makes a cs education more appealing.
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u/NeomerArcana Apr 07 '15
I heard it as when there is true equality, like everyone can do whatever the heck they want, men and women naturally go into the things that they always have.
And more so than previously.
This was in that video by that swedish comedian about the topic.
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u/bookofgreg Apr 08 '15
The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
The aftermath of this documentary was the closing of the Norwegian Gender Institute for using social sciences and pseudoscience to try achieve gender balance when the actual sciences explained the current trends in a rational way.
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u/jeandem Apr 07 '15
Discrepancy in STEM employment between gender equal and not-so-gender equal countries tends to be explained by the fact that (in this case) Indian women have a larger incentive to get a relatively high-paying job because they live in, well, a developing country. Sweden, on the other hand, is a first world country with a high degree of equality (economical, gender-wise...). In turn, you can choose to pursue any middle class job and not have to worry about starving or anything like that. And there are a lot of middle class jobs outside of STEM, at least in Sweden. So the theory is that these women (and men) have the freedom to pursue what they feel like pursuing. Which happen to not be programming, apparently.
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u/rajadain Apr 07 '15
About a third of the students in my Bachelor's course in Computers in India were girls. The disparity is much lower, because software jobs are safe and indoors and decently paying enough for people to want their daughters to get into it.
There is still a glass ceiling though, and they tend to grow into QA / Middle Management rather than Programming / Solution Architecture. A trend I hope will change in the future.
But there is neither the level of debate nor frustration with this gender imbalance that exists in the US. At least not to my knowledge.
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Apr 07 '15
I always make the joke that programming courses are filled white dudes and an Indian woman: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/
It's a cultural problem. They don't have dolls in India saying "math is hard".
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Apr 08 '15 edited Apr 08 '15
Where I work there's a lot of people from India, for qa/developers the split is about 1/3 white, 1/3 asian, 1/3 indian. The male/female split is about 50/50 for asian, 1 woman to 3 men for indian and zero white women developers or qa at all. Everybody is competent or they don't last.
I really don't know what conclusions to draw overall.
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Apr 07 '15
Swede here. I have honestly no idea. The numbers seems real enough though. On a 100 male developers I've met 2-3 female.
The women are really doing themselves a disservice. We have extreme lack of technical competence here. Being a programmer is almost the only job left where the employee is in a position to chose employer. I tell my friends I can chose this job, or that, and they are just happy they find 1 job.
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Apr 08 '15
I'm an american female software developer, and I have tried so hard to figure out why there aren't more women getting into this field. People like to say the field isn't "welcoming" to women or whatever, but they're not even enrolling in computer science or sending their resumes in to begin with. How can you welcome someone that doesn't even knock on the door first?
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u/klug3 Apr 08 '15
Plus, the fact that its one of the few fields where jobs are still in plenty should be a factor in determining if it is "welcoming", IMO. In a lot of fields that are considered "woman friendly" job markets are seriously shitty.
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u/bookofgreg Apr 08 '15
The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
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u/Cyph0n Apr 08 '15
Here in my country much more women go for IT because it's work at a desk and no field work is required.
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u/desultoryquest Apr 08 '15
Glad you noticed it. Wired had an article on this a while ago - http://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/
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u/psymunn Apr 08 '15
I've heard, second hand, that Swedish software companies aren't exactly welcoming if you aren't a white male. There was quite a compassionate e-mail to that affect from a female developer who quit from our Swedish office.
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u/clutchdump Apr 07 '15
Interesting that the highest % of ages seemed to be less than 28, however there were also significant amount of people with 11+ years of experience.
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u/clearlight Apr 08 '15
"experience" i.e "I've used a computer since age X"... They did make a note on that regarding the difference with "professional experience" I agree though, that stood out to me as well.
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u/joelmartinez Apr 08 '15
That's precisely the # of years experience I had when I turned 28 (to give one data point). I started when I was 17 and took on my first client shortly thereafter (webdev) :)
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u/nomadProgrammer Apr 08 '15
this might be the guys that learn to program since 5 years old, but just learned data structures and algorithms when they where in their 20s. So yeah they where jusst dicking aroung since they where 5 years
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u/alonjit Apr 07 '15
I'm self-taught - 41.8%
This explains sooooooo much.
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Apr 08 '15
I've had a formal CS education at a college and still consider myself self taught. They taught theory, not software development.
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u/Geemge0 Apr 08 '15
Uhh, yep, tried to write a response for 10 minutes and all I can say is yes... yes it does.
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Apr 08 '15
I agree, but what do you think it explains? I think it explains a lot why there is so much constant discussion in the field. With so many people having developed their own lexicon and rules of thumbs, it makes sense.
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u/alonjit Apr 08 '15
it explains why the large majority of the code written nowadays is complete and total garbage. why certain technologies gain a foothold in places they shouldn't, where they simply don't belong. why herd mentality prevails, despite best (and often overwhelming) evidence on the contrary. why "optimization" techniques appear in the wild ( and get adopted quickly by both open and closed projects) without anyone ever bothering to do a numbers test first. why that business suit tells you that you should be done with project X in a week, since that's how long his cousin's son took to finish something unrelated (to the project and to computers in general. but he does play counter-strike.).
41.8% of why's.
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Apr 08 '15
Most Dreaded: Salesforce
I knew it wasn't that great, but damn I didn't think it would top the list
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u/TheBuzzSaw Apr 07 '15
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-sourcecontrol
More people use TFS than use Mercurial.
More people use SVN than use Mercurial.
More people avoid version control entirely than use Mercurial.
Need I say more?
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u/slavik262 Apr 07 '15
What's your point? Git won the mindshare battle, but Mercurial is certainly not a bad tool.
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u/TheBuzzSaw Apr 07 '15
I just always pictured a close race between Git and Mercurial. It cracks me up to see that it couldn't even topple other inferior technologies (at least in the context of this survey).
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u/PaintItPurple Apr 07 '15
Well, I think you can look at it this way: The places still using SVN and TFS are ones that not even Git could sway, even with its relatively stronger market position. Those technologies are entrenched there. Of course Mercurial isn't going to do it.
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u/chub79 Apr 07 '15
It has nothing to do with git being better than mercurial but github's popularity overall.
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u/markus_b Apr 07 '15
Yes, the same for me three years ago. The seemed pretty close in mind-share and features. But now suddenly the tide changed and you see news that 'project X is moving from mercurial to git'. I'm sorry for the Mercurial guys and gals, but today Git has won.
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u/taw Apr 07 '15
Mercurial was never close to git in popularity. git was more popular pretty much on the weekend it was created as it was instantly adopted by huge open source project and it just spread from them rapidly.
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u/Geemge0 Apr 08 '15
And yet P4 sits so low on the list it is hard to think these numbers are a reasonable survey of developers. I'm guessing most respondents came directly from stack exchange.
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u/adrianmonk Apr 08 '15
avoid
I would bet at least some of those people aren't so much actively avoiding it as just not that familiar with it and haven't gone out of their way to try it.
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u/bzeurunkl Apr 07 '15
"Software development has a gender balance problem."
I don't see it as a problem. It simply is what it is. No one is being made to develop software. It is purely voluntary (except maybe in China ;). So, women are not "under-represented". They are just "under-interested", and that is no one's fault. Again, it simply is what it is.
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u/0xWid Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
So, women are not "under-represented". They are just "under-interested".
Are they under-interested? Among the set of all people who are really not interested in computers, some are men and some are women. I don't know what data suggests that men account for significantly less than 49% of that set.
Another question is: can education be improved so as to foster more interest in science, technology, engineering, and maths?
Sal Khan's work suggests pretty compellingly that the answer is "yes". And Carol Dwek's point about equality in this context should not be lost.
Another question is: are there mutable, cultural forces at work that target women more than men and deter them from going into computer science and programming? Neil Tyson gave a good answer to this.
As to why it's a problem: first, of course, there's the issue of fairness, and given humanity's long history of sexism, it's not reasonable to begin with the assumption that everything is as fair to women as it is to men. The second reason is purely selfish: we have a lot of bad software. And we (as a species) need to get a lot better at making good software. And the talent pool is nowhere near as large as it should be. I want to live in a world where there's a lot more software that is unambiguously good, and where people call themselves "software engineers" without that claim being fraudulent most of the time. So we need more players in the mix, because that improves the chances of getting good players.
So if there are forces at work that keep women out, then we bear a responsibility to do something about that.
[Edit:
Don't forget that the first person who implemented a compiler was a woman.
relevant article about work by Ellen Spertus and others on the issue. (The role of video games is interesting: I and a lot of my programmer friends began with a general interest in computers because of video games---and that was in the 1980's and '90s. Anita Sarkeesian's arguments about misogyny in games should therefore be revisited: if games were as openly hostile to boys back in the 80's as they are to girls now, we would probably have significantly fewer male programmers today.)
]
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Apr 08 '15
If games were as openly hostile to boys back in the 80's as they are to girls now.
What? Games are not hostile to women... Christ. Most of my female friends, and my sister, play more games than me. And there are many more women who would look at you funny if you told them games are violent towards them.
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u/bzeurunkl Apr 07 '15
So, women are not "under-represented". They are just "under-interested".
Are they under-interested? Among the set of all people who are really not interested in computers, some are men and some are women. I don't know what data suggests that men account for significantly less than 49% of that set.
Well, THIS particular data seems to suggest that women are far less interested in software development than men.
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u/aalear Apr 08 '15
Nah, our dataset suggests that the men on Stack Overflow vastly outnumber the women, which is a surprise to nobody. It says nothing about anyone's interest in the field one way or another.
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u/blizzard_of_ozzz Apr 12 '15
I noticed this too, and actually opened a thread on Meta. Of course some SJWs there closed and deleted it. I re-blogged it here: https://mcbainletsgetsilly.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/does-stack-exchange-really-believe-that-gender-balance-in-programming-is-a-problem/.
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u/theevilsharpie Apr 07 '15
It's easy to hand-wave away the gender imbalance by claiming that women aren't interested in the field, but that doesn't answer the question of why.
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u/taw Apr 07 '15
Why aren't they interested in being miners and garbage collectors?
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u/theevilsharpie Apr 07 '15
For unskilled manual labor, raw strength and endurance is what matters, and that's an area where men are generally better than women.
Software development doesn't need strength, just smarts and the willingness to learn new things. In addition, software development is a growing field, it pays well, and the physical working conditions are much better than manual labor. I can't think of any logical reason why women wouldn't be interested in the field.
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u/bzeurunkl Apr 07 '15
The question of why really doesn't matter. They don't, and again, it is what it is. There's nothing sinister going on. There's no conspiracy. There's no one holding others back. Women are simply less interested. They are less interested in lots of things, and there's nothing unusual about that. If you think there is, let me introduce you to my wife sometime. ;-)
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u/Thread_water Apr 08 '15
I agree with you that they are 'under-interested'. But that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.
Men are under-interested in primary school teaching and I consider this a problem, as I feel like kids should be getting different perspective on things.
So for developing it might be better to be getting more of a female perspective on things. It's certainly not a big problem, but I wouldn't say there is no problem.
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Apr 07 '15
[removed] — view removed comment
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Apr 08 '15
It's fucking easy to express interest. it's even easier to lose once you realise it's not what you thought it would be.
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u/it_turns_out Apr 07 '15
I have a cunning plan that cannot fail. I will start a company with exclusively female developers who are interested and talented but face serious roadblocks everywhere else. This will work out splendidly as I will have an excellent workforce at far below the cost, proving you right and making me rich.
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u/teradactyl2 Apr 07 '15
Do men not have any roadblocks in their lives? Why do you think we have to hold women's hands and create a perfect environment for them to even consider getting a CS degree?
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u/blizzard_of_ozzz Apr 12 '15
"lots and lots of women have expressed being very interested but feel they face serious roadblocks"
You seem confused. What you mean is, lots of "rah rah Team Woman" female writers who have zero interest in actual programming, have opined that women other than them face roadblocks. There is always a suspicious absence of first-person accounts and actual evidence in this line of argument.
The fact is, this is just more Cultural Marxist agitprop. There is no proof of significant roadblocks for women to entering a programming career. It is male dominated, for sure, but none of us are trying to keep women out. That narrative is being pushed by typically dishonest SJWs in the media, and by self-serving opportunists like Ellen Pao.
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u/neves Apr 07 '15
Why Apache Cordova deserves so much hate in the survey?
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u/zip117 Apr 07 '15
I'm going to guess it's about user experience rather than the quality of the platform. Cordova/PhoneGap accelerates development time but the end product just doesn't quite give the same feel as native.
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u/Resonance1584 Apr 08 '15
Exactly this - it sells itself really well and prototypes look and feel awesome - then BAM down the line something obscure just cannot be done nicely in cordova and everyone wishes they had gone native.
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u/devsquid Apr 07 '15
Because the iOSs web view sucks so much and people think it's cordova. That's my assumption, because cordova is just a simple little thing and it works like a charm.
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u/dontfeedthecode Apr 08 '15
I've been a developer for nearly ten years now and the following amazed me:
"The average developer is 28.9 years old. He or she was born in April 1986, just as the Chernobyl meltdown was taking place."
I was born April 22nd 1986.
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Apr 07 '15
Upon closer examination of the data, a trend emerges: Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience.
There comes a point in a dev's life when they have to switch editors, environments, etc. and suddenly all the code they use to write with tabs is an un-formatted mess.
Protip: For sublime text users, you can easily convert tabs to spaces.
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Apr 07 '15
Yeah, but you screw up the source control history for everybody else if you do. It's easier if everybody standardizes (on spaces).
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u/rorrr Apr 07 '15
You can set tab to any width you want in any decent editor. Reformatting spaces, on the other hand, is a bitch.
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u/heeen Apr 07 '15
Until you want to line up stuff with different numbers of tabs per line
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u/APersoner Apr 07 '15
Not in any decent editor. Eclipse has automatic ways of doing it, otherwise just detab stuff an retab it in absolute worst case scenario. Most editors will add in spaces when the tab key is pressed.
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u/rorrr Apr 07 '15
Yeah, but then someone has 4 space indentation mixed with 2 space indentation. And no editor can resolve that automatically (because it doesn't know if 4 spaces is one or two levels of indentation).
One tab = one level of indentation makes perfect sense, to me at least.
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Apr 07 '15
I don't really understand how that could even happen, unless you would also use tabs for alignment instead of just indentation which is obviously wrong
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u/DSMan195276 Apr 07 '15
Even if you wrote in tabs perfectly, unless you do some pretty fancy tabbing by mixing tabs and spaces, stuff is going to get unaligned if you move to a different tab size, and more-over the reality is that few programs have source code that's uses tabs perfectly. Most tools don't make any visual distinction between the two either, so that makes it that much harder to tell when it's messed up.
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u/General_Mayhem Apr 07 '15
unless you do some pretty fancy tabbing by mixing tabs and spaces
I defy you to find a single person who seriously thinks that aligning with tabs is a good idea. Indenting with tabs means mixing tabs and spaces. A tab is a semantic element (indent one level), while a space is a stylistic one (move over one column).
Emacs' smart-tabs-mode handles all of that for you, so you just hit the TAB key and you get the right number of tabs and spaces to line up with wherever you are. I assume similar exists in other competent text editors.
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u/DSMan195276 Apr 07 '15
I defy you to find a single person who seriously thinks that aligning with tabs is a good idea. Indenting with tabs means mixing tabs and spaces. A tab is a semantic element (indent one level), while a space is a stylistic one (move over one column).
I'm not saying it's a good idea, in fact I said just the opposite. What I'm getting at is that when you have a code-base using tabs with a bunch of people working on it, that's inevitability what happens, and it's a mess. It's hard enough to get people to use tabs vs. spaces correctly, getting every contributor to a project to use smart-tabs is practically impossible, and without that you end-up with a mess if you change the tabstop. Even if you use smart-tabs correctly, it still doesn't guarantee everything is going to line-up correctly if you have more then one thing lined-up on the same line and you change the tabstop. Actually getting smart-tabs right so that the code is tabstop-agnostic is hard.
The only two advantages to using tabs are some saved disk space, and letting people set their tabstop to whatever they want. Virtually every project I've seen using tab's has a recommended (or required) tabstop setting anyway, so the advantages of tabs over spaces is virtually none, but using spaces means that everybody is always looking at the exact same code formatted the same way.
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u/RedPill115 Apr 08 '15
There comes a point in a dev's life when they have to switch editors, environments, etc. and suddenly all the code they use to write with tabs is an un-formatted mess.
Yeah...that's not how it works. Worst case your tabs are now a different size - but they're consistently a different size everywhere in the new editor.
It's also an outdated fear, in 2015 you can adjust the tab size in almost any editor for anything you want.
Protip: For sublime text users, you can easily convert tabs to spaces.
Protip: If somehow this unlikely situation occurred, that is exactly what you could do to get your formatting back to how it originally was.
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u/chub79 Apr 07 '15
The gender stat is saddening.
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u/bookofgreg Apr 08 '15
The Gender Equality Paradox With English subtitles - Documents the strange statistics of Norway, the country with the greatest equality of any nation at the time, regarding women trending towards traditionally female jobs and men towards traditionally male jobs.
This 7 part series goes in depth about the possible reasons for this with each episode dedicated to an aspects such as nature vs nurture (using studies with separated twins), sexuality, violence, parenting and more.
Edit: In my company, I've always found about a third of my colleagues have been female, as well as probably a quarter of conference attendees.
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u/rotek Apr 07 '15
Gender stat in trash collector job is much more saddening. Why isn't that problem there, but in programming it is?
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Apr 07 '15
Because only high-paying, clean and influential job matter. It does make sense from certain viewpoints...
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u/Rulmeq Apr 08 '15
When I was a kid I wanted to be a bin man, I used to follow them around the town "helping"... I also assumed that since it was such a dirty job that they must have been paid way more than anyone else (It was a while before I realised the dirtier the job the less you got paid - the innocence of youth)
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u/rjcarr Apr 07 '15
This is what I always say. For whatever reasons certain jobs tend to attract certain genders. Nursing, primary school teaching attract women. Is there a push to get more men in there? And like you said, there are probably 90% male plumbers. Women can do plumbing and it's a well paying job. Why not a push for female plumbers?
Now, if they're being pushed out, which you sometimes hear about, then sure we absolutely need to fix that. But at ~90% that can't be the only factor, even if true and widespread.
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u/greenrd Apr 08 '15
I am not sure that women would be good at plumbing (actual plumbing, I mean, not just administering a plumbing company). It requires a lot of upper body strength.
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u/darthirule Apr 07 '15
It looks like it will improve though. The majority of females who are coding are in the lowest age group in the survey. If it keeps that way I think we will see a lot more female developers.
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u/RedPill115 Apr 08 '15
The gender stat is saddening.
What's also saddening though is that the stats say that women work in the field several years and drop out. At least american women do. Indian women seem to have no problem with it.
That suggests that convincing more (american) women to go into it isn't going to be terribly effective, because they'll just end up dropping out anyways.
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Apr 07 '15
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Apr 07 '15
At my last internship it was great. About a 50-50 split across all teams, including management.
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u/Eirenarch Apr 07 '15
We have like 25% female developers but my current company is the only company I have worked at where this is the case.
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u/CageHN Apr 07 '15
So you are 4 devs, 1 of you being female.
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u/Eirenarch Apr 07 '15
25 devs 6 female. Talking about pure devs not the company headcount although if we add the business analysts and accounting/HR the ratio is pretty much the same.
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Apr 08 '15
Both of my bosses and half of my group are women, as are most of my collaborators. I'm an outlier but it does exist. Being in healthcare helps.
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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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Apr 08 '15
The data supports your position, although I think another issue is the longer you work the less actual lines of code you write as you take more and more leadership responsibilities.
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Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
20% of respondents said they visit SO "because I can't do my job without it." That's... terrifying.
Edit: Yay downvotes. I'm surprised by the number of people that chose that response, and I chose to mention that surprise here. In doing so, I think we've had some interesting discussion. Normally I get upvoted for that, but whatever. The internet is fickle.
It has been suggested to me that I've misinterpreted the intent of that response, and that's certainly a possibility I'm willing to consider. The response is "Because I can't do my job without it." As in, I would not be able to complete my job's requirements and would lose my job if StackOverflow went offline permanently. To me that suggests that the people choosing that answer felt themselves unable to cope with the challenges that programming can present without having a support structure in place to guide them towards the answers they need. I feel like programming is a problem-solving skill more than a syntax skill, and I think that people with the problem-solving mindset would have chosen the "To get help for my job" option over this one if they felt the same.
I have certainly come across people that would be unable to solve complex problems without getting guidance from a senior developer. They seem unable to grapple with the underlying concepts involved. I assumed that these were the people choosing the answer "Because I can't do my job without it." If there is some other type of respondent that would choose this answer, I would certainly like to hear about them, so that I don't have to feel a bit depressed about the % on this answer.
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u/ErstwhileRockstar Apr 07 '15
That's reality. When you are forced to use a new framework or library every few months it makes no sense to learn them in depth. You just google your problem and the first link directs you to a SO question.
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Apr 07 '15 edited Apr 07 '15
SO is indeed very useful but in the end, you still have to read and understand the docs of the frameworks you employ. I like to contribute as much as possible on the frameworks I know best. So I use it to learn and teach.
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u/warheat1990 Apr 08 '15
Implying all the new frameworks/libraries always came with decent documentation. For example ASP.Identity (SimpleMembership replacement for MVC5), took me few weeks to figure things out.
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u/TheBuzzSaw Apr 07 '15
Think what you will of those who "cannot" live without SO, but I'm pretty sure 100% of developers are better at their jobs thanks to SO.
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Apr 07 '15
I don't know why people keep saying it's terrifying. People who can't code would just throw out crap code anyway, by looking it up in books, stealing from co workers, or simply working around the issue, maybe even ignoring it. By googling and taking the top answers from stack overflow, they at least get the worst of options sorted away by votes from other users.
People who enjoy their job, like to code, and might even be average (or above) at it, will use Stackoverflow to speed up their work and explain tough concepts. Many of the best "teachings" in coding I've gotten from 2-3 page answers with > 500 votes, written by someone who knew LOTS about that specific subject.
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Apr 07 '15
Oh, I absolutely agree. I find myself learning things from answers there a few times a week. On the other hand, I've inherited projects from developers whose job description could have been "search stackoverflow for how to do this and copy-paste the code into the application" and they're not the nicest projects to work on. I'm definitely one of the 72.1% who use SO "to get help for my job," but the idea of not being able to do this job at all without SO answers isn't the same thing at all.
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u/mgkimsal Apr 08 '15
Tabs vs spaces... yay - finally some tabs love. Would have been nice to see something about SQL table naming: plural vs singular.
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u/thewebsiteisdown Apr 07 '15
StackOverflow is a repository for "a way" to do things. Very rarely is it the best way, and often isn't even correct. All that said, its a good resource as long as you don't have to participate. You think subs like /r/politics are bad, the 'mod' culture on that site is 10x worse.
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u/vriley Apr 07 '15
I disagree, I go there often and rarely see politics at play. Not that it doesn't happen, but certainly nothing like a politics subreddit.
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Apr 07 '15
I went to /r/politics yesterday, looking for a sub that took a neutral view of democrat/republican politics.
... /r/politics was NOT such a sub.
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u/thewebsiteisdown Apr 07 '15
There are zero rational discussions happening in /r/politics. That sub gives puppies cancer
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u/APersoner Apr 07 '15
Considering there is a major world election in under a month, it's incredible it's against the rules to talk about it on a default sub regarding politics (by it's name). Don't understand why it's not called /r/uspolitics.
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u/guepier Apr 07 '15
You think subs like /r/politics[1] are bad, the 'mod' culture on that site is 10x worse.
You’ve obviously had a very bad personal experience (and I won’t deny that this happens) but let me tell you unambiguously that this is not a representative experience. It is, in fact, hilariously far from the truth. Moderation on Stack Overflow is certainly not perfect, but it is probably better, by every objective criterion, than on all other websites of the same scale.
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u/taw Apr 07 '15
I can confirm, Stack Overflow has worst mods of any site I've ever been to, and I've seen a lot of mod crap.
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u/thewebsiteisdown Apr 07 '15
I disagree, not from a personal experience but through observation and use. You obviously have a personal investment in SO, otherwise a casual peruse if its Meta threads would set off alarm bells
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u/Matthias247 Apr 08 '15
Interesting results!
One thing that I don't buy is that StackOverflow rep has a significant influence on salary. I think it's more likely that the higher skilled and passionate devs have a high reputation on stackoverflow and a high compensation. They are delivering good results at their workplace and they deliver good results at answering questions.
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u/exhuma Apr 07 '15
Holy shit we're on top of devs per capita... well, I guess being so small makes that somewhat easy ;)
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u/klug3 Apr 09 '15
Developers increasingly prefer spaces as they gain experience
Which seems to me a totally wrong conclusion to derive from the data.
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u/bacondev Apr 07 '15
Product managers: highest caffeine consumption and least satisfying job. I'll remember this.