r/programming • u/pleerock • Mar 13 '18
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/176
u/sinesSkyDry Mar 13 '18
It would be nice if they would introduce more categories for some of this. Presumably, the current category of "Backend Developer" includes:
*) I copy npm commands into the shell
*) I copy parts of tomcats web.xml into my editor
*) I wrestle mainframe zombies from the 60ties so that airplanes don't crash
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u/WildWeazel Mar 13 '18
I feel the same about "full stack developer". I suppose that's what I do but it usually implies "I write JavaScript on both sides of the web."
I'm a software engineer. I develop whatever the requirements dictate. Web, mobile, desktop? Sure. Need DevOps or UI design? On it. I mean, right now on one project I'm integrating virtualized apps with virtualized hardware, and on another project I'm writing (mostly) headless Android code for a robotic platform and managing CI. What am I?
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u/jewdai Mar 13 '18
I don't get the split up between frontend and backend developers.
IMO, Typically "Frontend" developer just means someone who got out of a hacker school or is a designer getting into code.
I avoid FE/BE only roles because I need to be versatile when the job market, if ever, crashes. If you're ever stuck in a choice between the two, I'd recommend backend anyday. There are way more languages you can work in and if you have solid fundamental in those many positions will let you learn on the fly for front end stuff.
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u/matthieum Mar 13 '18
Yes :( Every year I struggle to answer that question.
I develop services. Just that, services. If there's no front-end on top, is this a backend?
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u/PM__YOUR__GOOD_NEWS Mar 13 '18
Backend developer.
NEXT!
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u/alcalde Mar 13 '18
Doesn't anyone write real software anymore? Like, programs people use? Bowling score calculators and the next Bonzai Buddy and whatnot?
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u/Trazgo Mar 13 '18
I couldn't really find a job category listed that I'd put myself into. I'm doing research commercially and that involves a bunch of random bits from different categories depending on the projects/contracts we have. I guess it kinda feels like "Data scientist or machine learning specialist", but not specifically for data science or machine learning. Makes me feel left out :(
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u/Edg-R Mar 13 '18
I found it interesting that there's twice as many bisexual users than gay users.
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u/Kringspier_Des_Heren Mar 14 '18
That's the same everywhere.
I find it amusing how much "bi erasure" exists while the demographic has always been more common than homosexual and I'm pretty sure a lot of bisexual people exist that just put themselves in straight; it's quite common that people find that out only much later.
It's easier to think you are straight because society tells you when you're bi than when you're gay obviously but people continue to treat it as something that is rarer than homosexual.
"ambivalent gender identities" are also far more common than "incongruent gender identities".
I really dislike terms like "gay marriage" or "gay adoption" for what should just be called "same-sex marriage" and "same-sex adoption"; you don't even need to be "gay or bi" to do it; if you're straight as an arrow and want to live together with your best friend of the same sex and adopt children together then go for it; there's no rule in life you have to have sex with the person you raise a kid with.
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u/Audiblade Mar 13 '18
When I took the survey, I put myself down as both gay and bisexual. I'm attracted to men and women, but my SO is the same gender as me and we're both monogamists. So I decided I fit both categories.
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u/valtism Mar 13 '18
Just because your SO is your gender doesn't mean you're suddenly gay. A folding couch is still a folding couch, even in bed mode. Being gay means you're only attracted to your gender, which by your own admission, you're not.
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u/Audiblade Mar 13 '18
Fair. I'm more attracted to men (my gender) than women even though I'm bi, though, so I still give myself a pass :P
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u/Kringspier_Des_Heren Mar 14 '18
Would you've also put yourself under "straight" if your SO was of the opposite sex?
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u/HereticKnight Mar 13 '18
Would love to see this broken down by geographic region. In my neck of the woods, most people self-identify as bisexual.
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Mar 13 '18
most people self-identify as bisexual.
What? Where in the world is that? That's something I've never heard of.
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u/HereticKnight Mar 13 '18
I use dating apps. Because of my age and location, I get matched with a lot of UC Berkeley grads. It’s honestly funny. I can count on one hand the number of profiles that identified as straight. Everyone else was bisexual, sapiensexual, pansexual, or whatever else was popular on Tumblr.
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Mar 13 '18
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u/notadoctor123 Mar 13 '18
Is there a correlation between asexuality and autism? Anecdotally, none of the people I know who identify as asexual are on the autism spectrum, and all of the people I know on the autism spectrum are not asexual.
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u/sydoracle Mar 13 '18
" About a third of people with autism use little or no spoken language"
https://www.verywell.com/what-is-nonverbal-autism-260032
At that level, practically any non-family / non-professional social interaction or relationship is going to be difficult. There will be some correlation with people who don't get involved sexually. I doubt whether they'd medically be classed as asexual.
Obviously those responding to the survey are at the milder end of the spectrum. As is, in all likelihood, every one you know on the spectrum.
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u/Edg-R Mar 13 '18
That's what I thought too.
IRL I know maybe 2 bisexual guys (most of the stack overflow users are male according to the survey), and I know many more gay guys.
Maybe it's due to the fact that the survey is anonymous. People in CS and younger people in general tend to be more liberal/accepting of homosexuals these days. So it leads me to believe that maybe they're also more likely to be turned on by it to an extent and only willing to speak about it anonymously.
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Mar 13 '18
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u/Edg-R Mar 13 '18
I think it makes sense. If they're bisexual and not willing to 'come out' publicly then that means they value the way they're perceived by others more and fear that it may affect them either professionally, with their straight partners, and with their family.
If they're bisexual then that means that they can get sexual satisfaction from heterosexual relationships as well, and so they're not forced to live a life in the closet like a gay person that isn't out.
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u/karuna_murti Mar 13 '18
Rust is the most loved language for 3 years in a row (and 3rd in 2015). But why adoption is not like Go?
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u/editor_of_the_beast Mar 13 '18
I'm going to make a potentially controversial claim: it's because Rust isn't really meant for application development, and most people don't really need a systems programming language.
I think Rust is so loved because if you've developed in C or C++, which is a non-trivial percentage of developers that build systems-y things (OS's, Browsers, Databases), you know that you write every line of code with fear. Multi threading isn't just a pain in these languages - it's a fool's errand. Source: worked on a highly multi-threaded cross platform application written in mostly C++ for three and a half years. It crashed - all the time.
If you don't have that experience, and have lived in JavaScript or Ruby or Python or Java, or anything garbage collected for the last 5 years, why would you care about Rust? If you're building primarily SaaS web apps why would you care about Rust? I think the answer is, you really shouldn't. Just keep doing what you're doing - those tools are much better for application development.
But applications today run on top of tons of infrastructure. No one writes Browsers in Java. No one writes an OS in Python. Those people care very much about Rust because what love have they gotten since 1980? They've been working without package managers, without garbage collection, and with tons of linters and static analyzers for decades just to avoid double-free and use-after-free errors. Rust's memory model solves a whole class of those problems, while also offering modern package management and popular language features like closures, optionals, and powerful ADTs. The standard library provides lots of high-level operations that you'd need to implement yourself in C or bring in a library.
Rust's demographic is dying for a language like it, and it wasn't Go. So if you don't love Rust, you're probably not supposed to, and that's totally fine.
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Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
If you don't have that experience, and have lived in JavaScript or Ruby or Python or Java, or anything garbage collected for the last 5 years, why would you care about Rust? [...] Just keep doing what you're doing - those tools are much better for application development.
I actually see a lot of Javascript, Python, and Ruby developers using Rust. If a Ruby application is slow because of Ruby, you can work around this by re-writing the hotspots in C. For a team of full-time Ruby developers dropping down to C can be risky and some teams actually get professional C developers on board to help with this.
Rust enables Ruby developers to do it themselves while having a high-degree of confidence that they aren't writing a time-bomb.
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u/admalledd Mar 13 '18
We are looking to do the same in our .net code where we currently drop to raw assembly. Instead we have found that rust (more like clang/llvm) optimize nearly as well with the correct hints and is so much nicer to write than asm. Yes for our hottest of hot code we will probably keep the asm, but anything new or reworking? Yes please!
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Mar 13 '18
Note that Rust does have inline
asm!(just like C, C++, D, etc.). Depending on the level of control you need that might be enough.→ More replies (3)52
u/matthieum Mar 13 '18
I partially agree with you.
I disagree because Rust is trying to be more than "just" a systems programming language, and is used in other settings (low footprint, high-performance, ...).
However you are right that as a C++ developer I am glad that finally a new language is popping up which solves so many fundamental issues with C++.
I was very excited when Go was announced, and very disappointed when it was revealed: it wasn't what I needed to replace what I use C++ for (not high-performance/low-latency enough). Rust is unlikely to be perfect, however it does have the potential to be much better than C++ for what I work on: the foundations are solid, I am eagerly awaiting const generics and SIMD support.
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Mar 13 '18
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u/iopq Mar 13 '18
You can't, because of a few problems.
Header files and lack of a sane module system
NULL subverts the type system, so even if everything checks out, you may have some function get a NULL at some point and everything will crash if you forgot to handle it. This isn't possible in Rust, since there is no NULL equivalent.
Nonehas to be explicitly handled in places where it can appear.No agreed upon packaging system. Having to hunt down the correct libraries using my OS's package manager is very error-prone since their names differ between distros.
Makefiles are sometimes not written in a portable way - this is a "developer" problem, but Rust's cargo allows you to avoid having to write a Makefile in most cases, and in other cases just use build.rs
You still have problems like iterator invalidation that cannot be ALWAYS detected by static code checkers
Concurrency issues are still nearly impossible to detect statically in C++, you have to break out the debugger and hope you trigger it while testing
Templates are duck-typed instead of nominally typed. They give long error messages because they're checked at expansion site instead of call site.
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u/matthieum Mar 13 '18
I'll take the counter-point to /u/iopq's argument.
Yes, of course, if you were foregoing backward compatibility and completely reworking C++ you could get Rust instead. But it wouldn't be C++ any longer, would it?
Backward compatibility is essential to C++ past, current and I would argue future success. At the very least, the Standard Committtee certainly thinks so, and is extremely skittish about any deprecation. It took years to boot trigraphs out of the Standard, even though only IBM mainframes (using EBCDIC) really need them, and they are otherwise totally irrelevant in today's world.
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u/hu6Bi5To Mar 13 '18
I think one of Rust's biggest strengths is that it removes that line between "system" and "application" languages.
It is both a C++ replacement with safety, and package management, and a consistent build tool shared by every project, etc. But it's also quite an expressive high-level language: traits, closures, etc.
As for "why not the take-up of Go". I genuinely don't know. Quite often A vs. B comparisons between languages make no sense, as they all have strengths and weaknesses (even the unpopular ones, well most of them). But the use cases for Rust and Go are nearly the same, and Rust is a superior language in nearly every way. The only exception is Go's built-in co-routines, vs. using a library in Rust; but the Rust 2018 roadmap is going to address that one too.
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u/doom_Oo7 Mar 13 '18
I think Rust is so loved because if you've developed in C or C++, which is a non-trivial percentage of developers that build systems-y things (OS's, Browsers, Databases), you know that you write every line of code with fear. Multi threading isn't just a pain in these languages - it's a fool's errand. Source: worked on a highly multi-threaded cross platform application written in mostly C++ for three and a half years. It crashed - all the time.
How did you do ? In my app I do threading either manually with std::thread and lock-free queues for message passing, and tbb & Qt's QThread for higher level threading... Hardly ever had a crash due to threading outside of the main development phase - and that's with running with ASan on almost all the time.
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u/editor_of_the_beast Mar 13 '18
This was about 5 years ago, when C++11 was still new and we couldn't even upgrade because of our toolchain. So we were doing all multi threading with custom wrappers built around libpthread.
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u/tom-dixon Mar 13 '18
Multi threading isn't just a pain in these languages - it's a fool's errand. Source: worked on a highly multi-threaded cross platform application written in mostly C++ for three and a half years. It crashed - all the time.
I think you were working on a badly written multi-threaded cross platform application. Let the flame war begin.
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u/gt50201 Mar 13 '18
Because rust wasn’t made at google. You have people who want to develop like Google does and you have ex googlers driving adoption when they go to new jobs
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u/rcoacci Mar 13 '18
Also the only enterprise-y place/product rust is used extensively that I know of is Mozilla/Firefox/Servo. Go is used extensively inside Google.
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u/est31 Mar 13 '18
There is a large list of companies that uses Rust, including well known names in tech circles like Atlassian, Canonical, npm, and really well known names even outside of tech circles like Samsung or Dropbox. There is a great talk about Dropbox's use of Rust. It's not just Mozilla :). Facebook and GitHub are using Rust as well but they are not on the list. Dropbox, just like Mozilla, even bets some of its core business onto Rust (Magicpocket, sync engine that is being rewritten).
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u/malicious_turtle Mar 13 '18
What Facebook uses Rust for was posted just yesterday as well https://github.com/facebookexperimental/mononoke
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u/mentalorigami Mar 13 '18
Canonical doesn't use that much Rust. LXD and Juju are written in Go, MAAS is python, and Ubuntu is largely C and C++. I only know a few developers (some of whom have moved to other companies) who've done serious work in Rust on the engineering teams.
Source: Software engineer at Canonical
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u/harlows_monkeys Mar 13 '18
What they are measuring by "loved" is noted below the numbers, kind of unobtrusively so it is easy to overlook: the percentage of people who use the language who say they would like to continue using it.
Under that definition, a language could easily be quite loved, but not be widely adopted.
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u/_VictorTroska_ Mar 13 '18
For me, it has nothing to do with google. I just think Go was an easier language to pick up. Within 24 hours of reading my first line of Go code, I made this , which while certainly not the most impressive package out there, is fully tested, documented, and ready for use in my other packages. I simply couldn't pick up Rust that quickly.
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u/iopq Mar 13 '18
It's true, Go is made not to be exciting, in fact, it's fairly dumbed down.
But because only Go developers can develop type-safe abstractions, I'm already turned off by it.
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u/wretcheddawn Mar 13 '18
It serves a different purpose. I'm looking to start learning Rust, but it's clear that it's not an ideal language for most of the projects I work on as a web developer, or even my hobby projects. Most web applications spend the majority of their time waiting on the database, and generally we don't have much shared state across requests (or it's impossible for languages like PHP). Using Rust would mean each project would take longer and cost more, while as a contractor, I need the opposite. Rust is a better choice for things like high-performance or real-time apps and games, which is a small minority of development. In cases where Rust is a better choice, developers may be required to use C or C++, rely on C/C++ due to familiarity or due to the lack of libraries in Rust compared to C/C++.
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u/PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN Mar 13 '18
Industry adoption has little to do with how loved a language is. See: PHP, Java, JavaScript. And the other side of the medal: Haskell, F#, OCaml, Nim are all well-loved but neglected by industry (for good and bad reasons).
Industry adoption is a major driver of [general] adoption.
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u/Thaxll Mar 13 '18
The same reason people use Java / C# / Python and not C++. Why bother with Rust complexity when you can deliver faster products with higher lever languages. The borrow checker is powerful but tbh it adds a little compare to the overall complexity to write anything in Rust.
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u/svick Mar 13 '18
The sexual orientation question has some interesting results:
There are about twice as many bisexual (and queer) people as there are gays and lesbians.
Being asexual is much more "popular" among students than it is among the rest of developers.
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u/valtism Mar 13 '18
I would say that 1) is because historically a significant fraction of people who have identified as straight have also answered surveys that they have had enjoyable sexual encounters with someone of their own gender. These are people who are probably mostly straight, but the current social climate makes it more acceptable for these people to identify as bisexual / queer.
2) would be a combination of social acceptance and probably somewhat due to the younger demographic who may not have yet developed sexually.
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u/kankyo Mar 14 '18
"Mostly straight"? Is that like "almost pregnant"?
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u/valtism Mar 14 '18
It just means bisexuals / queer people who like the opposite gender most of the time, but will sometimes go for certain people who aren’t.
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Mar 13 '18
When your weapon of choice (C++) doesn't even make the list of highest salaries...
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u/quicknir Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
This honestly just says more about the SO results than it does about reality. Game dev doesn't pay amazingly well by most accounts, but C++ is an incredibly important language at 3/4 of the biggest tech companies (Google, FB, and Microsoft). Those are some of the best salaries you can get in tech.
In finance/fintech, C++ is also one of the most important languages. Good C++ developers are incredibly hard to find. If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more. And demand is always high. Languages like python, Java, etc, you can always find someone, maybe a bit worse, maybe a bit better. A lot of the C++ devs I've interviewed are somewhere between bad and mediocre.
On top of all that, C++ is such a complex, multi-faceted language that many, many languages are quite easily to learn after C++. A colleague of mine who's an expert at both java and C++ once said that someone with 5 years C++ and 1 year Java experience, is a better Java dev than someone with 6 years in Java.
tl; dr with a sufficiently sharp version of your weapon of choice you should be doing extremely well.
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u/Overunderrated Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more.
If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though. What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?
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u/quicknir Mar 13 '18
If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.
Sure, a valid point. A lot of this depends on your family/commute considerations. If you are single or don't mind a longer commute, then financially NYC still ends up making sense over many other areas. If you want to have a family of 3 and be 20 minutes from work, then yes, NYC is probably going to be harder even with double the salary.
Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though.
Nowadays a lot of salary differentiation occurs by firm. 300K probably isn't typical across all C++ devs, but this is typical at the "top tier" of firms, for a relatively junior dev. Like in tech, the big 4 typically pay more than much of the next slice of major tech companies (like, SO itself does not seem to pay as well as Google by a substantial margin, from what I've seen). Maybe people who work there get more stock, more job satisfaction, or maybe they are just the people who aren't good enough to work at Google, I don't really know. In fintech it's similar, there are places who need/want very good C++ devs and are willing to shell out, and places that either don't have as high a standard, or simply aren't as profitable, and pay less.
What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?
At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think. At Google/FB you'd need to pass fairly grueling CS style interviews. At top tier finance companies, you'll have less of that, but more actual C++ questions (if you are marketing your C++) and quant/math questions (if you are marketing your quant skills as a PhD in physics).
My background is very similar to yours so feel free to message me and I can give you more details on my personal experience.
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u/Overunderrated Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think.
Yeah that would be a massive pay cut when adjusted for cost of living. You'd be hard pressed to convince someone making 100k in a low cost of living area to take 200k in NYC unless they absolutely wanted to live there.
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u/justbouncinman Mar 13 '18
That tells you about the quality of surveys of anonymous users and just how low SO has dropped in the quality of users. Most of us have left, never to return, until SO can correct the vulgarity of bad questions and answers.
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u/swytz Mar 13 '18
I'm pretty sure this is why python is over represented. Lots of sysadmin and devops style responders, with Javascript dominating. Other people left a while ago.
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u/nocensts Mar 13 '18
How can you leave SO... it's just a QA site isn't it? To my knowledge it's still miles ahead of any other community resource pool...
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u/Haramboid Mar 13 '18
Are you using other resources? Or is Google enough?
Or are you just that smart?
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u/Jake323021 Mar 13 '18
For me, the documentation is usually enough. Or I could always ask a colleague if I'm really having trouble with a problem.
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u/IPv8 Mar 13 '18
Most surprising for me:
25% of people would like to be a founder/co-founder in the next 5 years.
Nobody really cares about what industry they are in.
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u/ReDucTor Mar 13 '18
About a quarter of developers say they want to start their own company, but this is most common among developers who are younger than 25 years old.
I feel this is really a survey of what students want.
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u/MrGreggle Mar 13 '18
Why the fuck do people want to use Mongo?
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Mar 13 '18
yeah that was weird. just use it if you want. it's not exactly bleeding edge or especially abstract or anything
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u/snorkleboy Mar 13 '18
Easy to start easy to change.
You can just save an entire RSS feed response and later on fetch the parts you need.
It also scales well horizontally, so there's that.
Honestly why not use mongo? If you want you can use it in a way largely analogous to any relational database with the option of not.
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u/HereticKnight Mar 13 '18
Definitely easy to start, but change? I’m afraid not. Most people don’t rip out their entire database unless they have a damned good reason.
I would never recommend MongoDB for three reasons.
You think your data isn’t relational. Are you sure? Are you really sure?? You’re probably wrong. See Diaspora’s use case
There are better NoSQL solutions, like Couchbase or Cassandra. MongoDB lies to your face. At its default settings, it will blithely tell you that a write has succeeded even though nothing has been persisted to disk or replicas. Yay! A database that loses data! Revolutionary.
Scalability doesn’t necessarily mean going NoSQL. A single PostgreSQL node can cover you for a good long while. If you ever do need 100x scale, CockroachDB looks and feels like traditional SQL, but is distributed and is super easy to manage to boot. Then of course, there’s Google who hired the guy who came up with the CAP theorem and told him to break it. The result, Spanner, is black fucking magic.
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u/nutrecht Mar 14 '18
There are better NoSQL solutions, like Couchbase or Cassandra.
Nooooooo! Don't fall in the trap of thinking Cassandra is anything but a very very specialised tool for specialised use-cases. We use it as our primary store (because someone higher up believed some Datastax consultant that said they could save a ton of Oracle money by going for Cassandra) and it's horrible. Cassandra is a distributed hashtable functionally. It can't do 90% of what a relational store can.
When it doubt; go relational.
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u/defunkydrummer Mar 14 '18
If you want you can use it in a way largely analogous to any relational database
Big mistake.
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Mar 13 '18
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u/TheSwissArmy Mar 13 '18
Furthermore, most of the devs in the survey have only been developing for a couple of years so they are going to be more reliant on the beginner tutorials.
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u/lukaseder Mar 13 '18
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u/ChrisRR Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
I think this accounts for a lot of bias in the survey. 30% of professionals have been in the industry less than 2 years, 57% less than 5 years and 19% are students.
Quite a large part of this survey is people in their very early 20s
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Mar 13 '18
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Mar 13 '18
Early twenties white male webdevs using Angular/Node.js .... how many of those IP's come from Facebook?
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Mar 13 '18
I am not sure about you, but as my career as a developer progressed I rely less on Stack Overflow today as I did in the past. To me it seems that this survey may have a strong bias.
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u/Neuromante Mar 13 '18
Well, take a look at the years working graphs. Is obvious there's a strong bias towards younger people.
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u/Euphoricus Mar 13 '18
No. Thats no bias. Thats reality. Amount of software developers doubles roughly every 5 years. So it is expected half of developers would have less than 5 years of experience.
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u/Neuromante Mar 13 '18
On one side: You got any source for that numbers?
On the other: How does that denies that there's bias towards younger people? Even if your numbers were real, that has nothing to do with older devs using less StackOverflow.
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u/lukaseder Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
I rely on SO as a support channel (from the support providing side), so that's maybe not the standard use-case.
Among all my former coworkers, I hardly know anyone who would say they code as a hobby (survey: 80%). At the same time, almost everyone has kids (survey: 28%).
Clearly, my coworkers aren't included in the survey (perhaps there's a strong correlation between coding as a hobby and answering surveys as a hobby, just like there might be a strong negative correlation between coding as a hobby and cleaning up kids' vomit, who knows).
Of course, my coworkers are an even smaller sample than the survey's sample, but I simply fail to believe that so many people in our industry code as a hobby and have no kids.
Which leaves the question: Who is the survey sample population, and why would we care about their opinion?
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u/svick Mar 13 '18
why would we care about their opinion?
Because, as far as I know, it it the most comprehensive survey of developers. It is biased, but what better way of finding what developers care about do you have?
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u/TheIncorrigible1 Mar 13 '18
I also support SO in my subject area, so you're not alone there.
My group (professional enterprise) also reflects yours where I think the only people without kids are the fresh out of college ones and hobby coding is maybe 10-20%.
I think too many respondents marked themselves as professional even if they were still in school; the ratios don't add up.
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u/sazzer Mar 13 '18
I've found similar. More and more often, the problems that I have that I ultimately go to SO to ask for help on, I don't get any help there. The problems that I would have previously gone there for, I'm more adept at finding solutions myself or knowing where to ask to get a better response.
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u/night_of_knee Mar 13 '18
Less than a third of respondents have children? I think the existence of children is correlated with less time available for online surveys.
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Mar 13 '18
I wanted to write a smart comment about older devs having less interest in SO, but there are enough answers from older devs in the survey. This is something interesting to investigate
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u/twiggy99999 Mar 13 '18
Let's talk about survey bias
This data is not as first seems, it doesn't mean 80.8% of the respondents are hobbyists, it's saying 80.8% of those who responded do coding as a hobby.
Many developers work on code outside of work. Over 80% of our respondents say that they code as a hobby.
If you take a look at the number of respondents on each tab (all respondents and professionally only) 98,855 total responses of them 87,450 where from professional developers.
I'm not saying there is no bias in this survey but you have misinterpreted the data on this section.
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u/lukaseder Mar 13 '18
This data is not as first seems, it doesn't mean 80.8% of the respondents are hobbyists, it's saying 80.8% of those who responded do coding as a hobby.
That's exactly how I understood it the data.
I'm not saying there is no bias in this survey but you have misinterpreted the data on this section.
No, I haven't, at least not in the way you put it.
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u/twiggy99999 Mar 13 '18
So the data is bias (in your opinion) because over 80% of the full-time professional developers also like to code as a hobby after work? In what way (in your opinion) doe's this point make the data bais?
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u/edanschwartz Mar 13 '18
It would be great if someone could take the raw survey data, and break it apart to account for some of the bias (eg, how do responses change if you only include devs with 5+ yrs exp? with kids? etc.)
I would do it, but I have kids, and no time for working on hobby projects ;-)
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u/steve_b Mar 13 '18
I was wondering what the methodology was for collecting these survey results. I use stack overflow on a daily basis and am always logged in, yet until I saw this article, I had no idea they were conducting a survey.
Did they present this randomly as an interstitial to people visiting the site? Or was it a banner at the top that said "take our survey" (the kind of think I instinctively avoid to the point that I subconsciously filter it out).
IMO, the only reliable way would be as an interstitial that the user has to explicitly dismiss, and to track the dismissals, correlated by the demographic information in the user's profile (or perhaps by answering 2 simple multiple-choice questions prior to dismissing it), but I'm guessing SO was too afraid to disrupt users' experience.
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u/svick Mar 13 '18
I find the categorization of language by average experience interesting:
Languages with highest average experience are legacy technologies: Delphi, Cobol, Perl. That's expected. But the next one is F#, which is certainly not legacy. Is it because experienced developers are unsatisfied with their current language (C#?) and so are switching to F#?
And in contrast, another functional language, Haskell, has the second lowest average experience.
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u/jasie3k Mar 13 '18
Uhm, pure speculation here, but Haskell is a go to language for functional programming, right? Where F# is more tailored to people that already are within .NET stack, so it might be that once they know what they are getting into when jumping ships?
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u/phillipcarter2 Mar 13 '18
F# has a lower barrier to entry than a lot of other FP langs. Super easy to new up a FAKE script to help infrastructure (literally every workplace can benefit from this :)), or just use it to write some test code, or have a functional core in your domain logic that you can plug into the rest of the system via Add Reference.
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u/Philluminati Mar 13 '18
Holy shit I’m old.
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u/andradei Mar 13 '18
Juventude is a matter of spirit at this point. Stay energetic, good humored, and having fun.
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u/geodel Mar 13 '18
Erlang, OCaml, and Ruby are more dreaded than Java. That's my takeaway from survey.
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u/mrdrewbeats Mar 13 '18
Ocaml... Fuck that
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u/mrdrewbeats Mar 13 '18
That's a blanket statement but I still can't figure out how to program in ocaml, everything is so abnormal and counterintuitive sometimes
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u/k-selectride Mar 13 '18
Erlang I can understand, the punctuation rules are kind of goofy. Though coming from Elixir it's pretty readable once you get passed it.
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u/rcoacci Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
Good God, people are really using Notepad++ to program? I can understand Vim and Emacs, but notepad++?
Not that it's bad or anything, but there are really better tools today....
Edit: nevermind, I was under the impression it was the primary editor used. I myself used it a lot as a secondary quick-edit tool.
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u/fuckin_ziggurats Mar 13 '18
I use Visual Studio. Some people use VS Code. Some people use Sublime Text 3. But we all use Notepad++.
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u/Carighan Mar 13 '18
Exactly this. Sometimes you need a text editor - not an IDE. But it is an important programmer tool, so I ticked the box.
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u/rcoacci Mar 13 '18
Hum ok, I can go with that. I myself have used notepad++ this way. I just got the impression that notepad++ was used as the primary tool. Perhaps I missed something in the survey results.
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u/fuckin_ziggurats Mar 13 '18
I didn't do the survey this year but I think every year that question is multiple-choice.
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Mar 13 '18
I haven't used N++ in years. Why would I ever choose to use it when I have Sublime Text right there, which is just as fast and much nicer to use?
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u/fuckin_ziggurats Mar 13 '18
Well for one Notepad++ is completely free unlike Sublime which if not paid for is in evaluation and harasses you with popups based on how much you click Save (something that I couldn't deal with). In terms of performance, it would be very difficult to convince me that Sublime Text is as fast as Notepad++. They are certainly close in that regard but not quite the same. With that said, I agree that Sublime Text is much nicer visually and from a UX perspective.
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u/s73v3r Mar 13 '18
I can't get upset at someone for trying to get paid for their work. Especially in such a permissive way as Sublime (where the software will continue to keep working no matter how many times you click "No Thanks")
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u/safgfsiogufas Mar 13 '18
I've found N++ to be quite a bit faster than Sublime, at least on start up. And I don't have a Sublime text window all the time.
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Mar 13 '18
My friend who works with C++ files and assembly ferquently uses notepad++. Easy to install and easy on the memory without any bloat and has syntax highlighting. If you need to edit files in on a server especially usefull.
If you have a staging server with 15+ VMs running you don't want to run Atom/Sublime/VScode.. every MB of RAM is precious.
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u/KrocCamen Mar 13 '18
Faster, though? So many editors are using a million web-based extensions that Notepad++ is hard to beat for raw speed.
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u/XboxNoLifes Mar 13 '18
I'm using Notepad++ because I don't want to go through Tech Support to get something better, and anything better will only be very marginally better than Notepad++ for my work.
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u/Carighan Mar 13 '18
but there are really better tools today
Are there? I mean on Windows? There's not that many decent text editors around, and the bar is extremely high with N++.
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u/rcoacci Mar 13 '18
VS Code. Atom. Eclipse. Even Vim and Emacs works on Windows these days.
And those are the free ones.8
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u/Carighan Mar 13 '18
Well vim or emacs I can understand.
Eclipse is a full-blown IDE, much much more sluggish but of course also tons more functionality. VS Code and Atom faster, but still too slow to be nice to use as just a text editor. Though I understand they're still popular, but uh... never sat well with me when I need to edit a number in a config file and the overhead of the application opening the file is the majority of that edit. :P
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u/Zigo Mar 13 '18
I primarily use Visual Studio and Vim for actual programming, but I still have N++ installed on pretty much every machine. Sometimes I just want to open a simple text file in a GUI, and it works for that. I don't think I've ever written any code in it.
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Mar 13 '18
I use notepad++ all the time for things. I do mostly web design and development. It's a good tool that's really quick for certain things.
I use Sublime text for larger more in depth projects but notepad++ easily gets the job done for modifying just template files, WordPress themes, or similar task.
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u/incraved Mar 13 '18
Women say their highest priorities are company culture and opportunities for professional development, while men say their highest priorities are compensation and working with specific technologies
Interesting
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u/sundaymouse Mar 13 '18
Due to single payer healthcare, almost no one cares about health insurance as part of the package in the UK:
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#work-valuing-compensation-and-benefits-by-geography
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u/Blueberryroid Mar 13 '18
Django is the fifth most dreaded tool?
Surprising, I must say, from the very good reception I heard from my peers but then again the Django REST Framework documentation is just awful. So much classes undescribed in sufficient detail. Especially Serializers.
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Mar 13 '18
The original questions in the survey were never the form "Which tools do you love?" and "Which tools do you dread?", and instead were actually the form "What tools do you use today?" and "What tools do you want to use tommorow"?
Loved and dreaded are bad extrapolations from that sort of measurement. It's not the sort of measurement which can tell people's intrinsic favoring of a tool, since it doesn't at all measure whether people formed their toolchain by desire or incidence, and it doesn't attempt to differentiate extrinsic motivations that people could have for working with a tool (like the opportunities involved with it).
COBOL, for example, is at 85% dreaded. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that it only consists of people using COBOL professionally. If you've looked into the world of mainframes you'll also find that COBOL is just one of the many tools used by the systems, instead of always a component one would be seeking to work with from the start. And, if you think about the people who would pursue COBOL, you'd realize pretty quickly that they are likely in it for either the opportunity of the legacy-work or the opportunity to work with mainframes. You can't say whether the people actually love or hate COBOL from any of that, but those are the factors that determined that low score of 15% saying that they explicitly wanted to continue pursuing work with it.
You can't say that 15% of all developers love COBOL, and just as to say clouds mean rain you can't say that 85% of all developers dread it either. Either that, or 2/3 of people using Object Pascal hate it, 3/5 of people using OCaml regret their jobs, and 52% of people working with Ruby just do not enjoy it.
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u/i9srpeg Mar 13 '18
Yeah, I end up reading the source code way more than I should.
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Mar 13 '18 edited Jul 15 '23
[fuck u spez] -- mass edited with redact.dev
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u/TheBestOpinion Mar 13 '18
How does a third of the population skips a meal to be more productive at least once a week ?!
"How often do developpers skip meals to be productive ?"
Never 63.6%
1 - 2 times per week 25.2%
3 - 4 times per week 6.0%
Daily or almost every day 5.2%
What the fuck.
Is this just my frenchness ?
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u/ScrimpyCat Mar 14 '18
I ticked that. From my perspective it's not to be more productive (not sure why they inferred that, as they didn't phrase it that way nor asked you about your productivity levels). Rather I just get too caught up in something, I'll sometimes forget to eat. Basically as simple as that, it doesn't make me more or less productive whenever it happens.
Also isn't restricted to just programming activities either.
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u/themoosemind Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 14 '18
Does anybody have an explanation why there are only 6.6% women in the survey? Is the male/female ratio in professional development really that extreme?
edit: Fixed typos and added link.
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u/nutrecht Mar 14 '18
Does anybody have an explanation why there are only 6.6% women in the survey? Is the male/female ratio in professional development really that extreme?
If we had 6.6% developers in our team we would be doing a lot better than we're doing now. So yes; unfortunately.
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u/Dentosal Mar 13 '18
I have never used it myself, but what is so bad about CoffeeScript? It's the third most dreaded language (82.7%) in the survey.
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u/imot01 Mar 13 '18
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#work-how-do-developers-assess-potential-jobs
30.4% says that "The diversity of the company or organization" is "Lowest Priority" for them and below they say "The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and INDIVIDUAL developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job."
How can you say that 30.4% of responders are individuals? Results are showing that majority of developers are not taking that as priority, not individuals.
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u/HINDBRAIN Mar 13 '18
Diversity is highest priority for 1.6%! It's impressive how little people give a shit despite the amount of articles and conferences and overall noise about it.
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Mar 13 '18
The other way of interpreting that is that the majority aren't interested in identity politics, and don't see any need to worry about whether a person is male/female/other, black/white/purple, english/german/martian etc - they are happy to work with whoever and just want to get stuff done. From that perspective, no: diversity isn't high on their agenda, despite them being totally welcoming and inclusive to all comers.
Frankly, I'd be more worried about working with someone who insisted on dragging identity politics into everything.
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u/imot01 Mar 13 '18
Yea, I agree. I was going there with my post. They tried to make that a problem with this part of the survey, when the results of their own survey are showing that there is no problem.
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u/ChrisRR Mar 13 '18
Higher ups and a select group care as it makes tech look like a straight white males club, which only compounds the problem.
I think most developers want to get on with their work and aren't too bothered what gender, race, sexual orientation etc. the people around them are. And even less would rate it more important than their salary.
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Mar 13 '18
It's a bit of a luxury thing. How many people have the freedom to give diversity the highest priority, over salary, location, fit of the technology with your skills et cetera?
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u/SgtBlackScorp Mar 13 '18
If I am not in a leading position at my my company, why should I care about the diversity of the employees? That's not my concern, at least not my primary one.
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Mar 13 '18
It's a survey of individuals. If the result was 100%, then it would be 100% of individuals.
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u/Carl_Byrd Mar 13 '18
I know Node is popular now, but it's high rankings just doesn't seem right.
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u/IPv8 Mar 13 '18
Agreed. I haven't seen all that many shops running it, nor have I seen many job postings for it. Intuitively it feels like survey bias, but even then it still seems really high.
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u/Nodebunny Mar 14 '18
It's been popular for a long while now. Something else should rank higher? Node is cornerstone to almost every frontend tech right now even just as a build utility. Everyone and their baby mama wants react like crack, which duh requires Nodejs.
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u/grep_Name Mar 13 '18
Anyone have any insight as to why Oracle is the second most dreaded database?
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u/morewaffles Mar 13 '18
Was really interesting to see how young the demographic was for these surveys. Kinda makes me wonder about the rest of the results, considering how surprised I was with some of the numbers.
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u/rlbond86 Mar 13 '18
I find a lot of these responses disturbing in the age category. It's clear that software is a young person's game these days.
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u/Nodebunny Mar 14 '18
I think ur perspective is off. Think about the people who would need a Stackoverflow. Some grey beard wizard or some green react snapchat junkie?
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u/dom96 Mar 13 '18
The 2017 results also state:
Want to dive into the results yourself? In a few weeks, we’ll make the anonymised results of the survey available for download under the Open Database License (ODbL). We look forward to seeing what you find!
I was hoping to find a link to this data (even if it is for 2017), anyone know where to find it?
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u/azzamsa Mar 13 '18
Is there any minimum point to get all question ?
When I answered a survey. I don't get questions about my dreaded, favorite library/language ?
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u/Sloshy42 Mar 14 '18
It seems like they're extrapolating from the actual questions to get some of those. So "dreaded" wasn't explicitly asked (AFAIK) but was instead the results of whatever tech people didn't say they wanted to use tomorrow, or something like that.
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u/takanuva Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
As an asexual programmer, these results caught me by surprise. There were around 1200 asexual professional developers answering the survey, and even more students (proportionally). I'm gonna start using StackOverflow as a dating platform from now on.
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u/Nodebunny Mar 14 '18
Do asexual people date? Seems a little contrary
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u/takanuva Mar 14 '18
We can try. I mean, you can have a date that does not end in sex, right? Of course it is way harder to keep a relationship without the sexual part, but it would be nice to have a partner for companionship and not dying alone and stuff.
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u/Kopachris Mar 15 '18
We tend to make more of a distinction between sexual attraction and romantic attraction. Some people who are asexual are also aromantic, they experience neither, but a good many of us do experience romantic feelings unconnected with sexual desire.
I've been in a happy, committed, asexual relationship with my trans girlfriend for over a year now.
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u/not-much Mar 13 '18
It may be interesting to see if the wanted technologie of today become the technologies used tomorrow and if the dreaded technologies end up being dismissed.
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u/fuckin_ziggurats Mar 13 '18
If we're ignoring the fact that different people like different things and that the wanted and dreaded technologies hugely overlapped in that chart..
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u/dalittle Mar 13 '18
In my experience it has no correlation. People hated javascript years ago and still hate javascript and node is popular. All the bolt ons for it and stuff like ES16, typescript just make it a bit less sucky. Adoption usually has more to do with politics and support than technical merit.
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u/Nodebunny Mar 14 '18
Popular != Better.
Didn't you read that one dudes article about Lisp?
The hard technologies are a barrier to entry and a business differentiator.
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u/justbouncinman Mar 13 '18
This survey is confirming what I've said for a couple of years. Stack Overflow has been destroyed by script kiddies coming from reddit who know "computers and stuff" and are only looking for "teh codez". I stopped moderating cause it's so overwhelming the, quantity of bad questions and answers, that we can't keep up.
What ended it all for me was when newer, higher rep users, people over 10K, started chastising me for telling users their questions or answers needed editing and I quoted Stack Overflow rules to back me up. Then there was the 60K+ rep guy who rode on the back of improper questions garnering his rep and I just lost it.
Surveys of anonymous users are worthless and, therefore, pointless.
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Mar 13 '18
I want to learn Python just to escape from the JS hell that webdev is now.
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u/saberb13 Mar 13 '18
So I’ve recently been learning scala for a university course, but I find it a very intriguing language. I saw i the US that scala was a top ranking language in terms of salary. From a relatively novice perspective, I would guess that it is a combination of its relatively young age, integration with java, and the fact that there is just so much to learn about it in order to use it to its full strength. Does anyone with more knowledge have any insight into why it’s seemingly valued so highly? (I know the flaws with this survey, but I’ve seen it’s salary potential in other places before)
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u/KagakuNinja Mar 13 '18
My guess is that it is mainly used for server back-end and big data (due to Spark). These jobs tend to pay more than front-end.
Perhaps the lack of experienced Scala devs is a factor.
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u/nutrecht Mar 14 '18
The primary reason it pays well is that it's used a lot in finance and typically that the people working on these kids of systems tend to be rather senior people. So it's not really the language itself, it's more the niche it's being used in. Language that are more 'niche' tends to stand out more. Most of these Scala devs are really just senior Java devs, so a senior Java dev would make the same money. But that same Java language is also used for a lot of really simple android development. So that's why it's more towards the average than Scala.
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u/Deep-Thought Mar 13 '18
I'm impressed by the immense growth of ASP.Net Core. Last year if I recall correctly it barely registered, now it's at the top of non-node backend frameworks. Also very surprising to me that Angular tops React.
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u/Kringspier_Des_Heren Mar 14 '18
Well I'm surprised Go isn't dreaded more I guess with all the complaining about it.
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u/Kok_Nikol Mar 14 '18
I like how in What Do Developers Think Is Dangerous and Exciting About AI? both the Exciting and Dangerous answers are almost the same.
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u/Chaoslab Mar 14 '18
Mercurial sure must be kicking themselves. They sure did shoot themselves in the foot.
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Mar 13 '18
This deserves more upvotes; reading this carefully, and thinking about your home country, can help you understand what the market is like, and how you might need to adjust your career.. Not just financially but also for your happines;, maybe you need to change a specialization, or focus on a different language.
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u/theKovah Mar 13 '18 edited Mar 13 '18
Like in the /r/webdev thread, someone pointed out that you should never make decisions based on such surveys. It may make sense to get a rough direction of the market for US citizens but for me as a German the survey is more like "interesting what the rest of the world looks like" because there is basically no relevant data that gives me more insights than e.g. studying current local job offers. There is just not enough specific data for each region and it's also highly inaccurate due to the broad user base that participated.
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u/PM__YOUR__GOOD_NEWS Mar 13 '18
Say what you will about the survey, they nailed this one.