
Developer Survey Results - juba08
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018
======
antirez
Cool to see Redis to be in top position. For what is worth, Redis confessed to
love developers, so it is definitely a reciprocal feeling.

Btw surprised to see "contributing to OSS" at ~50%. Looks like an incredibly
high number (cit. Trump), so would be awesome to see this question more fine
grained next time. This may be an indirect measure of all the work that goes
into OSS to make it sustainable.

I would like to see: kind of contribution (Opening issues, PR, managing a
project, ...) and average hours spent per week.

~~~
edanm
Definitely deserved for Redis, so thanks to you!

And I completely agree about the OSS - this makes me _really_ question the
sampling bias of this whole survey, because there's no way so many developers
contribute to OSS. Unless you really do mean something like "reporting
issues", etc, in which case i'd _still_ guess the real number was below 10%.

~~~
dep_b
Maybe "have a GitHub repo gathering dust" already counts?

------
arkadiytehgraet
I love the part about SO developer story: 84% either do not use it or have
never even heard about it (which basically shows its failure) yet insights
team tries to interpret it as 40% actually using it. Based only on this point,
I wonder how extremely biased their conclusions are overall.

~~~
pianoben
Quite a few of those stats seem suspect. For example, I personally find it
hard to believe that "80% of professional developers" prize Javascript above
all other languages. Seems unlikely based on my network (which of course is a
representative sample of all developers).

~~~
knightofmars
Where did you get the prized by 80% from?

I only see the "Most Popular Technologies" and it has JavaScript at 71% and
it's not "prized":

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-
popular-...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#most-popular-
technologies)

As far as it's popularity is concerned. It's not surprising the in least. If
you have anything to do with web development you're going to have to use
JavaScript. Making it "popular" out of necessity but not "prized".

~~~
pianoben
I'm using "prized" here as a synonym of "favored"; perhaps it's a bit archaic.
I don't intend to alter or misconstrue the meaning of the survey result.

Certainly, a front-end developer has a choice of compile-to-JS languages from
which they can choose.

------
jedberg
With all the talk of Vim vs. Emacs, it surprises me that Emacs is in the low
single digits, while Vim is 25% of all respondents.

It does not surprise me that it is 40% (and #1) amongst sysadmin/devops
practitioners.

~~~
cup-of-tea
That's because vim and emacs have different purposes and the choices were not
exclusive. I use emacs and even I know enough vim to get around and use it
regularly. 25% of people claim to use vim, but for what? Occasional editing of
individual files? In contrast, those emacs users almost certainly use emacs
for _everything_.

~~~
purple-again
This exactly, the guy next to me said yes to Vim (and makes sure to talk shit
to me literally every single time I open nano) but he literally used Atom all
day long and only uses Vim when editing a file stored on a remote server.

I don't care how you feel about nano, I use it less than .0000000000001% of my
development time and it serves its purpose just fine.

~~~
viridian
Assuming you work 80,000 hours in your career:

80000 _(.0000000000001 /100)_60*60 = 2.88e-7 seconds spent in nano in your
lifetime

[ I know it's an exaggeration :^) ]

------
boffinism
Note the salary graph that shows if you've got over 10 years experience you
can either be an engineering manager (small cog in a big machine) and make a
ton of money, or a CTO (big cog in probably a much smaller machine) and make
20% less.

~~~
zemo
the CTO/CEO point probably reflects that people who start their own company
AND take the SO developer survey always call themselves CTO or CEO. People
don't start their own company and call themselves a developer or an
engineering manager. CTO ... of what? Most startups will die before they ever
have an engineering manager.

~~~
pc86
C-suite is by definition close to the top but I wish more people would
understand it also needs to be _far from the bottom_. You're not working on
the types of things the C-suite works on unless you have a lot of people below
you taking care of everything else.

------
ryandrake
> Most developers feel that management is ultimately most accountable for
> unethical results of code. Just under 20% of respondents said that a
> developer who writes code used for unethical purposes is most responsible.

This kind of surprised me. On the one hand, we complain about being considered
code monkeys and mere "implementors," but on the other hand, if we're asked to
code something unethical, well "we're just following orders." I personally
think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our
responsibility to no do harm. Ask doctors this survey question and see the
wildly different results.

~~~
lightbyte
I think that one result is a bit misleading.

79.6% said they consider the ethical implications of what they are asked to
do.

82.3% said they would report ethical concerns in some form.

58.5% said they would refuse to write code they thought was not ethical (36.6%
said they are unsure).

~~~
ryandrake
Good point. I was also puzzled by that result, given the responses to the
question I mentioned. The picture it paints is that software professionals
feel their duty is to consider, complain, and (less so) refuse, but ultimately
responsibility lies elsewhere.

------
dwhabcdefg
As a queer female go programmer with over 15 years of programming experience,
I did not realize how much of a statistical outlier I am. Neat. (I have
trouble adopting the mantle of minority, as a well-paid middle-aged white
person).

~~~
smoyer
As a straight male Kotlin wannabe with over 35 years of programming experience
(with the first 20+ years paired with hardware development), I'm also going to
refuse to be categorized (nothing wrong with Cobol but I like the new shiny
things the youngin's are playing with). I think the most interesting facet of
software (the cerebral creation of something out of nothing) is that there's a
way for everyone to contribute in a way they find enjoyable.

------
d3ckard
I was seriously surprised how popular VSCode has become. I know it's good, but
for MS to win IT crowd that fast... kudos.

~~~
tpush
Visual Studio Code + the cquery extension is heaven for me coding in C/C++.

~~~
jhasse
Also checkout Clang-Format. It's so awesome to mark some unintended code and
have it formatted instantly in your editor with a key press. All while editing
the file via the Git diff view :)

------
Sir_Cmpwn
Remember that this data is representative of Stack Overflow's audience, not of
the entire industry.

~~~
gizmo385
I'd say that a pretty representative swath of the industry visits
StackOverflow. What segment of the industry do you think is missing in this
representation?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Different sectors of the industry use StackOverflow in varying amounts.
Systems programmers on the whole probably use SO a lot less than JavaScript
programmers, for example. More senior engineers use it less than more junior
engineers. And so on.

------
drinchev
I’m actually surprised that around 64% of the developers are having a
“Computer science, computer engineering, or software engineering” degree.

I do my personal statistics for colleagues I’ve met and the percentage having
no degree or degree in another field is around 7 out of 10.

Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups and do my survey in the
startup culture, but still it’s fascinating how much of those developers took
the decision to become one at around high school age.

~~~
blauditore
This probably depends largely on the area. Since you mention high school, I
guess you're mostly referring to the US situation. From what I've seen in
Europe, most (I'd say more than half) of the devs actually do have some degree
in CS, or at did a corresponding apprenticeship.

But still, I'd say the percentage of career changers is much higher than in
most other fields.

------
conradfr
Two unrelated remarks:

I'm surprised that Elixir was the 6th most loved language last year and
disappeared this time, while Erlang gained some points. Was it even in the
survey?

Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences in
Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing factor
for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> Also it's interesting that women placed compensation at 4th in "Differences
> in Assessing Jobs by Gender", but if you point that fact as a contributing
> factor for the pay gap you can be labeled as sexist.

How can you be labeled sexist if you point out a simple fact?

~~~
atom-morgan
Ask Damore.

~~~
salvar
Yes, he clearly only pointed out facts and nothing else. This is a fair and
honest assessment of what happened.

------
dyeje
What's up with Rails not being included in the Frameworks section when Django
and Node.js are? According to Google Trends, Django and Rails have similar
interest:

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2F...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0505cl,%2Fm%2F06y_qx,%2Fm%2F0bbxf89)

~~~
cpburns2009
That's weird. Also, can Node.js even be considered a framework? Isn't it just
a run-time system?

~~~
jxub
This illustrates the confusion about JS in general.

------
computerphage
Rust wins "Most loved" for the third year in row!

~~~
AstralStorm
And yet corporates still don't use it and schools don't teach it.

This shows how much power opinions have.

~~~
steveklabnik
There are over 100 companies who are willing to put their logo on our website,
and others we know about but can’t say, including Fortune 500 companies.
Dropbox just went public and their project in Rust (and Go) was cited as a
reason for their increased profitability. There have also been multiple
university classes in Rust.

It’s a start.

(Also, this survey never claimed to be measuring either of those metrics...)

~~~
purple-again
We have been using Rust in production for around 2 years now (yes its been a
bumpy ride...) at a big stuffy old school finance company that I'm sorry
doesn't want their logo on your website.

The Rust code is not only mission critical, it is literally THE defining
factor that has won us several very large contracts now.

I make no attempt to compare Rust to other alternatives in its class, we chose
it because we were developing primarily with Ruby/Ember at the time and it
felt like a natural fit.

~~~
steveklabnik
Glad to hear it!

------
lucideer
I quite enjoy the irony that Coffeescript—a language apparently invented to
make Javascript more palatable—is the third most dreaded language in the
survey.

~~~
purple-again
Atom is written entirely in Javascript and I can edit it however I want???
Thats AWESOME!

Wait its written in coffescript...fuck you.

That's a replay of a real life experience that went down when I first heard of
Atom.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
The more layers you add, the less inclusive it becomes. Coffeescript is
decidedly a divisive technology.

------
mherrmann
I think it's interesting how VS Code jumped from 5th place among web
developers in 2017 [1] to first place [2]. This made Sublime Text lose a
place, putting it in third. If I were ST's Jon Skinner, I would not be happy
about having M$ as a (free!) competitor.

[1]: [https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-
mo...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-most-popular-
developer-environments-by-occupation)

[2]:
[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-m...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology-
most-popular-development-environments)

------
pascalxus
There seem to be a lot more young developers than old developers. But, why? I
can only assume that either, the number of developers is increasing (more and
more young people entering the work force), or a lot of people stop being
software engineers after 8 years. People usually work between the ages 22 and
65, so given a even distribution, if the industry isn't growing by leaps and
bounds, the average work experience should eventually be about 20 years with
an average age of 42.

~~~
mywittyname
Growth of technology and an increase in job openings. Plus, a bit of cultural
shift too. I think a lot of older developers grew up during a time when
spending a lot of time using technology was considered weird. While today, not
using technology all the time is what is weird.

Also, software developers are much more highly regarded by young people now
than ever before. There's this image of the young, rich entrepreneur creating
products that everyone loves, and people want to be this. So a lot more smart
people get into the industry because it's the cool place to be, hence the rise
of "brogrammers."

------
adumbledore
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.

------
vivan
One nitpick here - they refer to Angular as AngularJS - these are actually two
different things. I don't quite remember but did the survey itself distinguish
between the two? If not then this will skew the numbers upwards.

~~~
swyx
i rather they be combined. I know they are different but one is the successor
of the other.

------
watwut
I don't believe that "Almost half of professional developers contribute to
open source projects.", even if you count every single half baked unfinished
project on Github as contributing to open source.

~~~
andreime
Contributions include bug submissions and (were possible) comments in RFCs,
right?

~~~
watwut
Yes, but even there the 50% seems too much. I can see people submit that much
bugs in cutting edge communities (where there are still a lot of new bugs to
submit), but when you work with something stable you rarely ever need to do
so. There is huge amount of positions where people successfully use what
exists.

Plus, calling bug submissions as open source contribution is a stretch. You
would not call "contributing to close source" when someone reports a bug to a
company.

------
fauigerzigerk
The "Platforms" answers are hard to believe, or let's say it's hard for me to
believe that they are remotely representative of the overall developer
population.

18% claim to have done development work for macOS. That's more than for iOS,
which is neck and neck with Raspberry Pi.

What's going on here? Have web devs simply checked all platform boxes?

~~~
conradfr
It's also really strange (to me) how no PHP frameworks or CMS made the cut.

~~~
fauigerzigerk
WordPress is up there at 16%

~~~
conradfr
Ah yes, I was more thinking about the "Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools"
section, my bad.

------
pythonaut_16
I'm surprised Vue doesn't show up on the list anywhere. From everything I've
seen Vue should probably show up in either the loved or wanted categories.

~~~
megaman22
I'm not sure anybody outside of HN readership knows about Vue at all. It's
either Angular, old Angular, or React everywhere.

~~~
janneklouman
Don't you think that's a bit naïve? Take this anecdotal counterevidence for
instance: none of the four people I work with visit HN but all know of Vue.

------
Dowwie
Who Is Ultimately Most Responsible for Code That Accomplishes Something
Unethical? 19.7% voted "the developer who wrote it"

Do Developers Have an Obligation to Consider the Ethical Implications of Their
Code? 79.6% voted "Yes"

~~~
gemma
I initially bumped on this one too, but "obligation to consider" doesn't mean
"obligation to quit their jobs over". You consider the ethical implications,
you push back against management, management tells you sit down. Are you now
obligated to quit? If you decide to keep your job, knowing that the code will
be written either way, are you now ultimately responsible for it?

( _Completely_ unrelated but the first thing that came to mind:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKdgDX2dGh0))

------
blauditore
I wonder why there's so much dread for Cordova. It's a framework you don't
interact with often while using it, so I would assume devs would have neutral,
unemotional stance towards it, but apparently not.

~~~
3pt14159
Because a lot of us web deva used it once for a contract before swearing it
and all of mobile development off forever. I’m sure it’s come a long way
since, but it was pretty brutal to understand and debug years ago.

~~~
dep_b
Because you're actually interacting with two completely different stacks at
least that have a pretty leaky abstraction. So you only get the painful parts
of iOS development, certificates and build chains not the fun parts. Repeat
that for Android. _points double barreled shotgun at chin_

As a native iOS dev I write my own wrappers for web applications, I think
Cordova is too just too much hassle for what it really does and only limits my
possibilities as a native developer hosting a web application.

~~~
mamcx
Off-topic: Any good point in how make the android webview to perform well?

------
acchow
Wow people actually use Ocaml at work?

~~~
davedx
Yep! Facebook and Docker among them.

~~~
justincormack
Also Jane Street etc.

------
matchilling
Another #FunFact: Perl ranked number 5 in "What Languages Are Associated with
the Highest Salaries Worldwide?"

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-
loved-d...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-
dreaded-and-wanted)

~~~
vgy7ujm
#1 in Perl programmer happiness also. (Not part of survey.)

:)

------
dcpl
Just out of curiosity, why do so many people want to learn Go despite it not
being used that much, 7.1% from the survey?

~~~
kej
If you come from a Python/Ruby/JavaScript background (which is a lot of
people), Go is a language that is not much more complex but will run faster
and be easier to distribute. I can see that being a big appeal, especially
compared to something like Rust or C++ which is going to require a lot more
learning to become productive.

------
arvinsim
Whhy is the salary for F# developers high?

~~~
suprfnk
On that note: Anyone know of any good F# learning resources (preferably
books/text) for an experienced C# developer who has only done a little bit of
functional programming (Haskell, Clojure) here and there?

~~~
megaman22
Get Programming with F# is finally done, and looks pretty good

[https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-
sharp](https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-f-sharp)

Real-World Functional Programming With examples in F# and C# is another good
one

[https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-functional-
programm...](https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-functional-programming)

The NoStarch Book of F# is a pretty decent beginner's book

[https://nostarch.com/fsharp](https://nostarch.com/fsharp)

Would second the vote for F# Deep Dives as well.

------
austincheney
Coming from the web world I find the term "back end developer" a heavily
abused term. Most developers of web products would consider themselves back-
end developers and typically program in either Java (or one of its variants)
or C#. This isn't back-end merely because it isn't in a browser.

Your average web product Java developer is all middleware. They write code
that gels between internal services and output to the user environment. At
most large web companies real back-end teams are heavily isolated and don't
let the middleware people come anywhere close to them even if they are all
writing in the same language. If your web-product Java developer needs data
they call to a service managed by an unrelated team.

------
Zitrax
Any idea why salaries for C/C++ developers seem to be way below average in
these stats?

~~~
bigcostooge
International responses skew the salary data and make it useless.

~~~
gota
This is true. It always feels weird answering these kinds of questions living
outside of the US. You can easily have a salary that is several times the
average of your country (I'm talking like 20x) and still make about half of
what you'd make in the US, when shown in USD.

------
zbentley
The "Why Do Developers Participate in Hackathons?" question is missing an
answer option that I suspect is distressingly common: employer-mandated
hackathon participation.

Multiple places I've worked, and many places I've heard about from my peers,
require employees to participate (either as a "this is just mandatory"
requirement or as a "this influences a milestone on your performance review"
requirement) in company-sponsored or external hackathons.

This trend is somewhat distressing and deserves to be highlighted, I think.

------
xpavlic4
I like how Scala is connected to Spark and Hadoop but nothing else...

------
garganzol
>.NET Core

Thanks they hadn't put a Silverlight instead of .NET. StackOverlow makes this
mistake third year in a row. It is not .NET Core, it is .NET.

.NET Core is just yet another implementation of .NET runtime.

~~~
james-skemp
As a .NET developer, there's a difference between saying .NET and .NET Core,
however.

You can be interested in .NET Core but not in .NET in general if you're
looking for cross-platform applications, for example.

Having used .NET for almost a decade, I think I selected .NET Core for a
couple options since I hadn't been able to learn about the differences. And
there's pretty significant differences, especially tooling support (like the
inability to really do database-first as easily as you can with .NET).

So, I think it's fine.

------
pjmlp
Nice to see C++ on the loved languages section, while C only deserved an entry
on the dreaded ones above C++ and has half of the wanted percentage.

~~~
jgh
Other than the verbosity the new versions of C++ are so much nicer to work
with than C++03. C++17 is even better, constexpr if simplifying templates,
structured bindings (though I wish there was an ignore option), optionals, if
the C++ standards committee isn't careful they might end up with an enjoyable
language in a decade or so.

------
cup-of-tea
I wonder how many are "web developers". They seem to have broken down that
category into three or four possibly overlapping subsets. "Front-end
developer" and "back-end developer" should be mutually exclusive because
people in the intersection would be "full-stack developers". But if that were
the case then more than 95% are web developers.

~~~
frou_dh
Backend does not necessarily mean web technology. I'm reminded of an oft-lost
distinction between "The (Inter)net" and "The Web".

~~~
cup-of-tea
I've not heard of other network services using the term "backend". Is writing
a mail server "back end" development?

~~~
frou_dh
Yes. A rather uninspiring appraisal of cyberspace — web browsing & emailing —
though.

------
pascalxus
It looks like most people stay at a job for just a year or 2. But, it would
have been interesting to see a question as to why they left: were they forced
out due to something the company did, or did they leave of their own accord
for a higher salary (that was top ranked for how they assess a job)?

------
kej
Results aside, I really dislike the presentation of different data sets in
separate tabs. If I want to see the difference between all developers and
professionals, or between genders, I have to click back and forth when it
could have all been presented in one chart to begin with.

------
dmh2000
In the section "Valuing Compensation and Benefits by Geography", I was
surprised that Germany (13.7%) and Canada (9.7%) showed similar results to the
USA (11.5%) on the relative value of health insurance as part of compensation.
I thought they had that covered.

------
erikb
Do people not know that there is a database called Hana? Honestly before my
time at SAP I also didn't know but I thought it's my personal failing.

------
Froyoh
Was very surprised about the gender ratio: 92.7% Male, 6.8% Female, 0.9% Non-
binary, 0.7% Transgender

~~~
executesorder66
What were you expecting?

~~~
Froyoh
A lot more females?

~~~
executesorder66
Like 10% more or like 40% more females?

I get that a lot of people want more diversity in Tech, but honestly it's just
not something most girls are interested in.

If you saw the following gender ratios for pre-shcool teachers: 92.7% Female,
6.8% Male, 0.9% Non-binary, 0.7% Transgender

Would you be surprised? Would you think more men need help "getting into the
industry" since they are underrepresented? Or would you think that most guys
just don't want to do that for a job/career?

------
wiz21c
FTA :

> Race and Ethnicity > Sexual Orientation

Could we agree that : 1/ a coder is a coder, no matter his color, his sexual
orientation, his whatever 2/ the notion of "race" is problematic at best

And before I get down voted : who cares about a statistic about sexual
orientation or ethnicity in a survey about IT ? I mean honestly.

~~~
boffinism
> who cares about a statistic about sexual orientation or ethnicity in a
> survey about IT

People trying to make the IT industry accessible to all regardless of sexual
orientation or ethnicity, who want to check in on how we're doing at that?

~~~
dorgo
If you hire 50 random people (uniform distribution) the probability to get
twice (or more than twice) as many employees of one sex as the other sex is
about 3.5%. If you add ethnicity, age, sexual orientation etc. to the mix you
will rarely get a random sample with all attributes proportional to their
occurrence in population. Without quotas it will be really hard to be
accessible to all regardless of [a long and ever expanding list of
attributes].

~~~
wiz21c
Thanks for that answer !

------
ropans808
What are people finding so dreadful about Redshift?

~~~
scapecast
I think I can answer that, given we're in the business of Redshift
performance.

Redshift is incredibly powerful, but can be a pain to work with if you're a
data engineer. To get the most out of it, you need to turn a lot of knobs -
and knowing how to tune it is really complex. But if you get it right - it
blows everything else out of the water. Including Snowflake and BigQuery.

The key to success is using Redshift's Workload Management, and using best
practices for your schema, table and query design. Many people who start using
Redshift come from a mySQL world and are not familiar with a columnar storage
db. Sort / dist keys are not concepts that people are necessarily familiar
with.

------
royalghost
Good!

------
bruxis
Quick question: How are ~14% of all respondents from India, but 4.1%
categorized as Middle Eastern in the Race and Ethnicity breakdown?

This is just one example of a strange anomaly in the data.

~~~
hdkrgr
I guess most will identify as 'South Asian'.

Also you can see that the race/ethnicity question only has ~55k responses out
of 100k respondents in general.

To many of us it feels like a very US-specific question that we are glad to
skip. Racial identity is just not part of our lives. I might identify as as
European, but certainly not as 'White or of European descent'

~~~
SiempreViernes
Yeah, it is a bit weird to use US specific notions of race outside of the US
itself. How many Europeans in Europe feel that of "European descent" is an
accurate description?

------
benkuhn
It's a little disappointing to see so many developers--maybe on average the
most comfortable job in the world right now--prioritizing comforts like
compensation, using their favorite languages, or remote work, over helping to
improve the world.

Over 45% of men prioritized one of the above three, whereas a mere 6.5%
prioritized "How widely used or impactful the product or service I'd be
working on is." Revealingly, "How much impact _I_ could have by working there"
isn't even an option. Sounds like the survey authors didn't even consider that
people might actively care about improving the world.

So many developers have comfort to spare! Maybe spend a little bit more
optimization power on trying to accomplish something important?

~~~
s_dev
>prioritizing comforts like compensation, using their favorite languages, or
remote work, over helping to improve the world.

Compensation isn't a comfort -- it's more like payment which is necessary. Not
really something a developer could forgo.

Regarding languages -- why would they not want to leverage their knowledge to
get more compensation?

~~~
calcifer
> Compensation isn't a comfort

Sure it is. If you can "be fine" with $X, but are looking for a job that pays
$Y (where $Y>$X), then that's seeking comfort.

~~~
crispyporkbites
$X directly relates to when I retire, so I see a high salary as buying time
and freedom

