
Results of Stack Overflow survey of 20,000 developers - glaugh
https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-survey-2#workspaces/18726
======
jgmmo
Seemed like an awfully large amount of developers make less than 20 grand.

I did some analysis that I think is a little more useful.

Compensation & Job => filtered by 'US only', 'not looking for a job', and
'provided a job'. [https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-
survey-2#workspaces/18770](https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-
survey-2#workspaces/18770)

~~~
mamcx
Well, the mytho that a developer get a lot of money only fly in USA, maybe?.

Outside it? Well, at least in latin america US 5000/Year is _normal_.

A lot of good developers I know are clearly below the hour rate one in USA
get. We do it because we love to programming, but here is well know that is
very hard to be "rich" as a developer.

In fact, that is why I quit my job then do my own projects, consulting and
freelance: I still not get a lot of money -however, I charge more than a lot
of my peers (us 30-40/h), but certainly can work with things I like more.

~~~
pvarangot
I'm from Argentina, and used to work (a long time ago though) with developers
from Venezuela an Brazil.

Not even an entry level developer makes U$d5000 a year, unless he is not
working full time and even that would be stretching it. Entry level jobs in
shitty places get you arround u$d7500/8000 a year. First job in a big company
after you graduate gets you arround u$d11000/year, and with 2 or 3 years of
experience you can get u$d15000/year easily if you are worth the investment.
Upper tier jobs (manager, project leader or research for a big corporation,
working remotely for someone in the US/Europe, consulting) start in
u$d20000/year and can easily get to u$d30000/year.

That is using Argentina's and Venezuela's black market exchange rate, or
Brazil's official one.

In Argentina even a PhD candidate gets more than u$d5000 a year from his
publicly funded University. No idea about Brazil/Venezuela on this.

~~~
GFischer
I have the stats from the Uruguayan Chamber of Software (CUTI), for the
average salaries here in Uruguay (which is admittedly one of the better paying
countries in South America) based on 330 companies (most are small, low-paying
shops), and from my experience, they're what people are actually getting (in
the IT industry, service companies pay more):

Monthly salary before taxes (take home pay is between 80% to 60% for the
highest salaries)

Junior Dev (0 to 3 years): U$ 1000/month - U$ 12.000 year before taxes (but
almost untaxed, maybe 10% in taxes)

Intermediate (3 to 7 years): U$ 1250/month - U$ 15.000 year before taxes

Senior (> 7 years or exceptional): U$ 1850/month - U$ 22.000 a year before
taxes

Tech Lead/Super Senior: average U$ 2500/month (before taxes) so U$ 30.000 a
year before taxes

Project Manager (Dev Lead or actual manager, not PM role): average U$
2500/month (before taxes) so U$ 30.000 a year before taxes

Many of the better and smarter developers either open up their own consulting
shops (making a lot more than those averages), or work remotely.

The best developers I know of make about U$ 40.000/year before taxes.

I'm currently stuck at the "senior" level, the thing is the cost of living
isn't that much cheaper than in other countries so I really want to make more,
so I must start working remotely if I want to break the salary barriers here.

~~~
conanbatt
You can get 40% taxes on high income? thats nuts.

The cost of living in SF is crazy, 40k in Argentina , in terms of nominal
value, after taxes are probably around 32k/y, 2600 net dollars per month. Rent
of a 1 bedroom place in a decent neightborgood=> 400 U$S a month. Grocieries,
living costs, going out,etc,say..250 U$S? Lets make you a party animal and big
spender at 400 U$S a month for that.

So after takes and expenses, 40k a year in argentina yields you 1800U$S a
month.

In san francisco, a 1br for yourself is 2k a month at least. Work often
provides food, but if it doesnt, at 10 dollars a meal avg you get 10 x 30 x 2
= 600U$S in food alone. Restaurants, shows, going out, drinks, add 200 U$S a
month, if you go out weekly.

That ends up being about 2800 U$S per month only on rent+food. To be able to
nominally save 1800U$S a month, you have to make 4600U$S pre-tax, which at 28%
taxes, ends up being about 70k annual income.

The point of this exercise is to measure the impact of cost of living on
salary: it definitely makes a dent(you need 30k a year more in San Francisco
for the cost of living difference). However, its very easy to make 100k+ in
the bay area working for a startup (and more if you work for facebook or
google), which means you will always make way more money working in a startup
in the us,than any income bracket in uruguay.

(assumption: cost of living in Uruguay ~= Argentina)

~~~
GFischer
Cost of living in Uruguay is higher than in Argentina at the moment, mostly
due to rent being close to twice as much.

I pay U$ 700 in rent+expenses and it's not uncommon in a "good" neighbourhood
(I was paying close to U$ 1000 before, including very high apartment expenses,
in one of the better neighbourhoods called Punta Carretas, think Palermo,
before I had to downsize).

If you own your own home, living becomes much cheaper, but I don't :( and
they're incredibly expensive right now (the housing bubble never burst here,
though it has slowed down).

Food is more expensive here as well, but not as much as housing.

I pay U$ 700 for food and going out for 2 people (We do eat takeaway and go
out a lot, so it's definitely not normal. But I get paid U$ 300 in meal
vouchers which suck).

So I have U$ 400 for the rest (including gas, insurance, medicine, any extra
expenses...), so I basically can't save (I could if I cut down on the eating
and going out part).

"Real" salaries are higher I think, so it makes up for a bit of the difference
between Uruguay and Argentina.

But still, I'll never be able to afford a house unless the housing bubble
bursts or I start working abroad.

I'm including social security and healthcare in the "taxes" part (that's why I
said take home pay could be 60%), I get deducted 17.5% of my nominal salary
for social security, 20% for taxes, and 5% for healthcare. To make it worse, I
actually get paid a part of the remainder in "meal vouchers" called Tickets
Alimentación.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meal_voucher)

~~~
conanbatt
I see, thanks for the data.

Rent in Argentina is crazy low in proportion to property pricing. As rent
grows 20% year over year on contract, and inflation is higher, rent is lagging
behind. I remember my absolute dollar value rent going down from 400U$S to
350U$S, in a 1 br 82m2-next to subway-first occupant appt.

Inflation really does a number on the economy.

And Im glad meal vouchers dissapeared in argentina, we had all sorts of them 8
years ago.

Regarding property prices in Uruguay, don't you have a reliable mortgage
industry? Ours is ridiculously small, and inflation makes it risky and
unreliable for both lenders and borrowers.

------
Aardwolf
The data itself is really interesting! But the UI, gee, lots of frustration
with tiny scrollbars, things not fitting on my large monitor, mal-aligned
tables if scrolled right, gigantic help screen appearing everytime you close
something, ">" and "$" of the values used in alphabetical sorting, ... I'd
prefer oldschool HTML tables over this...

~~~
glaugh
Hey, can you shoot me an email at contact @ statwing? I'd love to hop on a
screenshare for 10 minutes.

Agreed that the gigantic help screen thing upon close is dumb. But a couple of
the things you mention sound more like browser-related issues/bugs, we'd love
to see them live for a second.

~~~
Aardwolf
Hello,

Thanks for seeing the feedback! I'm sorry, screenshare will not work out, but
the platform I used is Firefox on Linux. The misaligned tables happen when the
data is wide, so there is a thin horizontal scrollbar at the bottom that only
appears on hover (which my personal taste doesn't like, sorry about that).
When using that scrollbar to go all the way to the right, the top labels of
the table are misaligned.

The thing is, the data would be easier to view if it would simply be wider and
the browser could arrange the scrolling of the whole screen(e.g. left/right
arrow keys would do it).

~~~
glaugh
Point taken about the scrollbar only showing on hover, definitely an issue.

For context, there's some tricky issues that come up in building a way to view
tables that can scale to 10,000s by 10,000s (e.g., you can't just plop down
the html, even though that would suit this particular dataset well).
Definitely still got some kinks to work out.

And thanks for reporting the misaligned tables on Firefox/Linux thing.

Cheers, and thanks for the feedback.

------
owenversteeg
Some things I noticed:

\- 55% of programmers surveyed are making less than $20k/yr, which is
ridiculous.

\- 4.9% of programmers surveyed are women

\- 2.7% of programmers surveyed are 51+

\- 17.5% of programmers earning less than $20k/yr live in California.

That last fact caught my eye, so I did some math:

This article ([http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-
exit/](http://www.wired.com/2014/04/no-exit/)) says that the author pays
$1250/mo "for a mattress on the floor, behind a panel of imbricated torn
shower curtains, in an unheated rabbit warren of 20 bunk beds under a low
converted-­warehouse ceiling." Assuming they all live in the same space that
the author lived in, they spend $15000/yr on rent alone. Assuming that they
have health insurance, a cell phone plan, and pay $3/day for transportation,
they have (and I swear I'm not making this up) about $3.50 per day to spend on
food.

~~~
ramayac
I'm a full time developer Java/SQL, finishing a MBA... and I still make <
$20k/year. It's ridiculous in USA, but in LATAM it's sad reality.

~~~
thiagocmoraes
In which city do you work? If you go to a big IT center in Brazil such as São
Paulo or Campinas, $20k/year is just a little over the starting salary for a
new grad from a top school. There's LOTS of worse positions, but this is not
really that hard to find, considering that HN crowd is probably more qualified
than the average developer...

~~~
elboru
That's true in Mexico too, if you work for small or local companies in a
small/middle city, <$20,000 is almost the rule, but if you go to bigger
cities, having enough English skills, with international companies, then
salaries are incremented at least 100% (but still far from salaries in the
US). That according to my experience, coming from an 800,000 citizens city to
Guadalajara second biggest city in Mexico.

------
lifeisstillgood
Aaaargh. This really frustrates me. I would rather have a bunch of text files
and a link to the R manual.

Really, this is Stack Overflows annual "OK Cupid" moment and instead of a
really linkable blog post with two gee-whiz insights I get "here you go, find
an insight by spending two hours learning a UI you will never need again"

Did I miss the blog where they had already looked at the data themselves?

~~~
glaugh
Pre-analyzed results are available here, also downloadable:
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/02/2013-stack-overflow-
us...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/02/2013-stack-overflow-user-survey-
results/) [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/01/2012-stack-overflow-
us...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/01/2012-stack-overflow-user-survey-
results/)

This was just us at Statwing grabbing their data (with permission) and
sticking it into our software with the goals of making it easy to explore and
exposing folks to Statwing.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Thank you.

------
contingencies
After 6-10 years of experience, some bunch of people wind up self-reporting as
'full stack'.

After 10 years, this declines and they become 'Manager / Team Leader' or
'Other', categories which previously did not self-report very much.

Not super fascinating, but it confirms my own path (15 years commercially and
counting).

------
jakejake
This is really cool - I found it interesting relating the "job satisfaction"
statistic with various other things like "hours per week: fixing bugs" or
"hours per week: meetings." It goes pretty much as you would expect except
that the two extremes seem to have the highest satisfaction. The only one that
was exactly like I would have expected was "hours per week: technical support"

------
return0
Did they do some filtering of their users or just raw data? In that case they
asked 20000 _stackoverflow users_ , and their results will not be
representative of developers as a whole.

------
hoopism
I wanted to make fun of it too but started playing with the data and found it
to be really easy and actually a lot of fun.

How dare they ruin a good cynical take.

~~~
glaugh
Ha. We apologize. Oversight on our part, we're normally more loyal to our good
friend cynicism.

For what it's worth, this demo is a bit less fun than typical because all the
data is categorical (i.e., almost all of it stems from multiple choice
questions).

Our more typical demo dataset--every project run on the DonorsChoose, like
KickStarter for teachers--includes numbers and times, such that you get a lot
more variety in output:
[https://www.statwing.com/demo](https://www.statwing.com/demo)

~~~
gdewilde
I think 80% of the software developers never find a job in it and 90% never
write a single line of useful code.

This is what the survey says.

~~~
walshemj
Yes how many of the respondents where actual working professionals as opposed
to students and so on.

------
dangero
Full time remote workers have the highest average salary. That's an
interesting data point. Correlation is not causation obviously, but it's
interesting that the more time you spend out of the office, the more money you
make. (Compensation plus bonus)

~~~
Xixi
The reason could simply be that the pool of jobs available when you work
remotely is larger/of better quality than the pool of jobs available within a
reasonable distance of where you live.

Buying a house is also negatively correlated with salary [1] for a similar
reason: you are less likely to relocate for a better job (whatever your
definition of better is) when you own a house...

[1] can't find the source for that claim, sorry.

~~~
dangero
Could be. Could also be that people who work from home are more likely to ask
for what they want. Working from home would be one indicator of that.

------
joshfraser
Compare OS and compensation. Apparently all the highest paid developers use
Windows 7.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Enterprise?

~~~
akiselev
What is "enterprise" in this context? Do they work for an enterprise
SaaS/vendor or for an actual enterprise, aka big businesses that use software?
I don't think either of those are particularly better paid than the other
groups.

I think it's more likely that the best paid programmers are working in a field
with specialized software that only runs on Windows. For example, EEs use
Windows almost universally for Altium/Cadence/Mentor Graphics software which
means that the majority of commercial firmware compilers and IDEs are Windows
only too (even though many are forks of cross platform tools). The same is
pretty much true of biotech too: a majority of the software that interfaces
with hardware, especially lab automation, is on Windows so anyone dealing with
those specialized fields would be start with Windows and run VMs for
everything else.

Another explanation would be hardware support. My workstation has a high end
but not a server mobo (with funky features like Marvell's weird simulated
RAID) and dual SLI K-series GPUs (professional/super computing). Getting
Ubuntu 14.04 to even boot up, let alone properly deal with monitors and
peripherals like a 3D mouse coming and going, takes at best an entire work
day. Windows 7 with NVIDIA's drivers and VMWare leave much to be desired if
you're a fan of Linux but they just work, especially if you have to do
anything with CUDA at the same time as your main line of work.

Also: Visual Studio.

~~~
ajryan
It was a joke.

------
ambiate
I enjoyed 'hours surfing the internet' for those 'currently looking for a
job.' If you have enough time to stay employed and surf the internet: you
probably just feel like you're employed to receive a paycheck. Not challenged
at all and seeking adventure in a new shiny grass field. Let's read about
those greener fields (or burn time) instead of acting on it.

~~~
Gracana
As someone with debt and family and school obligations... It can be _very_
hard to act on something like that. I feel trapped.

------
norswap
Would love to see some analysis of the data. Too lazy to do it myself.

~~~
Fuzzwah
There is a subtle but statistically significant relationship between effort
and reward.

~~~
eykanal
There is a significant relationship between willingness to invest effort and
potential payoff. Spending ten minutes playing with what is essentially an
online pivottable to _possibly_ find learn an interesting but ultimately
useless factoid counts for me as a large investment for a low payoff.

~~~
danielweber
The video helped tremendously. Without it I was completely lost.

~~~
notastartup
what video?

~~~
danielweber
Analyzing data in Statwing

Select variables

Analyze

Video Tutorial

[ VIDEO TUTORIAL HERE ]

------
withme
Only ~13k of the 20k reported a StackOverflow reputation, and none of them had
more than 10k rep? That seems odd.

~~~
jacquesm
No, that makes perfect sense. The ones with the high SO rep are the ones that
have the most time on their hands, the others are clocking up paid hours.

~~~
withme
Joking aside, I'm genuinely confused as to how you survey that many of the
site's users and get no one with rep above 10k. Especially considering that
high rep users are much more engaged and invested in the site, and so I would
expect a much higher response rate from them.

~~~
jacquesm
What's my rep?

------
pbnjay
It's a fun data set to explore, but without the ability to compare interaction
effects the UI doesn't allow you to get very deep into the data. Also, it'd be
nice to be able to filter out the highly correlated tables.

Otherwise a cool presentation, I particularly like the little arrows for
significance p-vals and CI tooltips.

~~~
glaugh
Thanks.

For now, the best way to deal with confounds and interactions is to run an
analysis a couple times, filtering for a third variable in various ways to see
how that affects the analysis.

Obviously it'd also be nice to also have multivariate regression, or at least
views that integrate 3 different variables.

------
shekhar101
A bit off-topic but the page looks really heavy and responds slowly on a
rather powerful machine that I have. Any idea if we can get a csv or raw data
of this?

------
danford
I was surprised more developers used Linux than OS X.

~~~
mqsiuser
E.g. Ryan Dahl uses Linux and has objections towards OSX. I trust him (and
others) and I use Ubuntu on a MBPR (Linus likes 13inch screens with high res &
low weight... he actually has a Mac Book Air). Now Ubuntu is maybe okay but
for a professional SW-developer/hacker there are a couple of more roads to go
down with (BSD, myriad of Linux distros / devices). There is a Mac standing in
our living room and if you are an iOS dev ofc. Better than Windows in my
opinion.

------
enodios
I find it interesting that developers at small companies (1-25) are apparently
the happiest, but also spend the most time surfing the web.

------
doweig
Can someone give interesting stats out of this mess ?

------
btribbensee
statwing rocks...

