
2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results - sambrand
http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016
======
santiagobasulto
Fun fact. In Argentina the previous government used to give subsidies to
McDonald's to keep the BigMac cheap, so these numbers around the world
comparing salary to the BigMac index would look better.

~~~
hitekker
A very fun fact indeed!

Here are some sources to go with it:
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/05/01/why_big_macs_are_cheap_in_argentina.html)

[http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-
big-...](http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-mac-
attack/?_r=0)

~~~
santiagobasulto
Thanks! I'm too lazy I guess :)

------
wimagguc
_> for the third year in a row, "full-stack developer" was the most common
response [for occupation]_

Might be a loaded question, but doesn't full-stack mean just "web developer"?
From the survey, _" Full-stack developers are comfortable coding with 5 to 6
major languages or frameworks (vs. 4 for everyone else)"_ \-- with knowing a
bit of Wordpress that's fairly easy to collect: php, sql, html, javascript,
css. Done.

Or full-stack is the new _ninja_?

~~~
losvedir
> _Might be a loaded question, but doesn 't full-stack mean just "web
> developer"?_

Huh, interesting question. I think a "web developer" could focus more on front
end or back end; I usually identify as "full stack web developer" to indicate
I do both.

However, if I read your question another way: are you asking if "full stack"
could apply outside the web realm? Can you be a "full stack"... erm compiler
developer? I know compilers generally have a "front end" and a "back end", but
I'm not sure if I've heard the terminology used that way. I'd be curious to
know if "full stack" is used in other niches of software development than just
the web.

~~~
jghn
My experience has been that "front end" or "back end" often implies a web dev
shop. This isn't _always_ true, but it's generally the case

------
hitekker
> 10% of respondents self-identified as Ninjas. Real ninjas don’t tell you
> they’re ninjas. They just sneak up on you and slit your throat, which
> generally constitutes "hostile workplace environment."

Ah, good wit. Very nice write up!

~~~
agentgt
My company makes recruiting software so I talk and deal with many recruiters.

I have to say I severely cringe every time a recruiter says "Rockstar" or
"Ninja" (in a job description or ask if I am one). Just imagine using those
terms for a talented medical doctor or lawyer. "Microservice" is quickly
becoming another new recruiting term that I am beginning to despise. At least
"agile" is mostly dead... mostly...

Speaking of which what ever happened to "Scotty", "Rocket scientist" or
"Macgyver" (those were the sexy euphemisms back when I started software dev).
They were far more apropo.

~~~
sciurus
Maybe we've just replaced "agile" with "devops".

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
I have heard a candidate for a software engineer position talk with straight
face about his current workplace's "devops team" and handing off software to
them. So maybe it's getting that way.

~~~
jedberg
If this were reddit this is where I would post a "The force doesn't work that
way!" memes.

I can't stand it when people ask about a "devops team". That's not devops
then! That just means your sysadmins can code too.

Now, if they are asking about a devops _software_ team, that's a different
story.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Yep. What it means is like "agile" did, it's reaching the "old wine in a new
bottle" stage, with less actual hard work of changing the way people work for
the better, and more easy slapping a new trendy label on existing practices.

------
rickhanlonii
It's interesting to see that over 34.5% of developers surveyed use some flavor
of a JetBrains IDE:

Intellij - 17%

PhpStorm - 7.4%

PyCharm - 6.8%

RubyMine - 1.7%

WebStorm - 1.6%

\---

Total - 34.5%

This makes the Intellij IDE the third most used environment surveyed. If
you're not using a text editor, chances are you're using a JetBrains IDE. I'd
be interested in seeing the text editor vs IDE breakdown (broken down by age
and experience) once the full data is released.

~~~
zippergz
Were people only allowed to pick one? If not, I'd assume the total is lower
than that since some people probably use more than one of them.

~~~
wpietri
Yeah. I've used multiple ones for years. Especially now that they have the
license that gives you access to all of them, I prefer to use the language-
specific one unless I'm doing a project that requires multiple languages.

~~~
manyxcxi
I've definitely noticed the language specific ones are a little nicer with
automating some of those workflows that are very specific to the language.
Like starting a new PHP project in PHP Storm vs IDEA

------
OJFord
Interesting that:

    
    
       - JS ranks high in 'wanted' to develop  
       - JS doesn't appear in 'love' developing  
       - CoffeeScript ranks high in 'dread' to continue to develop
    

Big discrepancy in appeal for people on the outside looking in compared to
those using it!

~~~
onestone
To be fair, JS appears in 'loved' as Node.js.

~~~
OJFord
Ah, I overlooked that.

Though - without checking the original questions - that still suggests an
element of "came for JS; stayed for Node".

~~~
onestone
Uncertain. There could be other JS-related technologies below the cut - React,
Redux, etc.

------
mixedmath
I remain as surprised as last year about the prevalence of Notepad++. My
circles do not intersect these users, I think.

~~~
Delmania
For Windows, Notepad++ fits nicely for situations where "I need more than
Notepad, but less than an IDE". It's a great example of the a well done pieces
of free software on Windows. I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime,
and none of them beat N++.

~~~
suprfnk
> I've tried Emacs, Vim, Atom, Code, and Sublime, and none of them beat N++.

This ofcourse being entirely subjective.

~~~
drakenot
This really surprises me. What can N++ do that Vim or Emacs couldn't do? Or
what is easier at least?

~~~
Delmania
Both Semiapies's and Cthulthu_'s comments hit the mark, Notepad++ is a
definitely Windows application that just works straight out of the box. (As a
caveat, I have spent a lot of with a command shell and vim).

The other thing is that, as a Windows developer, I spend a lot of time in my
IDE. Whenever I try to use Emacs I quickly get sucked into the fact that the
most productivity gains you get from it are when you use it for as much as
possible, like OrgMode, reading emails, etc. It's advantage is that you can
write elisp plugins to customize it for your workflow. As a standard corporate
"textbox over data" developer, I have the full suite of Office and Visual
Studio at my disposal, so I don't see any benefit to use Emacs. Also, Emacs on
Windows is definitely a second rate experience. You can't launch a daemon
process, and it requires setup to get copy/paste from the OS to work well.

Vim is great, and it works well on Windows, but again, most of the time I am
editing code, it's in Visual Studio. If I need text manipulation or searching,
it's a real loss to paste into Vim, and then have to switch over to
remembering Vim commands.

I've come to the realization that tools like Vim, Sublime, and Emacs are
awesome if you do the majority of your work on them. The more tasks you can
pile into them, the less context switching you have, and more consistent
experience you get.

On Windows, Notepad++ fits that niche perfectly, it uses the Windows commands,
present a consistent interface, and it has the power to do powerful text
manipulation when needed.

~~~
Delmania
One thing about the context switching comes to mind as I was reviewing this
post a day later. I am capable of being very good at vi(m)'s commands when
using vi(m). When I need to ssh into a headless server to deploy or modify a
text file, I just immediately use vi. When I try to use a vi emulation layer
(VsVim, Evil Mode) I choke, because I inevitably use a set of keystrokes
native to that application but do not work in command mode. Just more evidence
towards my claim the benefits of a text editor can only be realized if you try
to pile in as much as you can.

------
Jommi
What really hit me was the graph about valuing salary[1]

On one hand it looks like there is a drastic difference: Developers in Finland
and Sweden don't care about their salary! But looking at the Y axis reveals
that the difference from the mean is about 15 percentfigures.

On the other hand, even that is quite a lot. It also allows us to make
sweeping statements like Finland's coders are undervalued (?) or that over
half of the Developers in Finland or Sweden did not value Salary.

cool cool!

[1][https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#mon...](https://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016#money-matters-more-in-some-countries)

------
saosebastiao
Just want to point out that the top 4 most loved languages are ML
derived/dialects.

And poorly utilized. When is the rest of the software world gonna catch up to
this?

------
seren
As a non web developer I am fairly surprised that about 50% of developers are
"web developers".

Is this the distribution in the global developer population as well ? Or is
this a bias due to Stackoverflow which by its very nature is web centric ?

~~~
ryandrake
Biased towards users of StackOverflow, not developers in general. Unless you
believe the population of developers who took the survey is representative of
the entire world of software developers--I'd be willing to bet it's not.

~~~
douche
Yep, StackOverflow tends to be a ghost town on non-web-related technologies,
and basic programming language contructs/techniques - and those are heavily
weighted towards Ruby/Java/C#/Python, where the questions are not
_necessarily_ about web dev, but you can tell the questioner is working on the
back-end of a web app.

------
akavi
Am I really that much of an outlier in loving coffeescript?

I know a lot of people don't like the extra translation effort to debugging,
and some aren't fond of significant whitespace, but I'm surprised that that's
enough to make it into the top 5 most _dreaded_. Is there something else I'm
missing?

~~~
mavdi
My reaction to CoffeeScript over time:

CoffeeScript is shit, CoffeeScript is ok, CoffeeScript is great, CoffeeScript
is ok, CoffeeScript is shit

------
Illniyar
From the looks of it Ruby has really lost it shine.

It doesn't appear at all in the "most popular technologies, not even in back-
end, and it lost 6% in "trending tech". It also doesn't appear in any other
metrics.

Is it really a trend or that SO's community is not representative of Ruby
practitioners ?

~~~
waylandsmithers
My personal impression was that Rails has matured and there aren't as many
open problems at this point-- there are agreed upon patterns and gems for most
things you want to do in creating a web app-- or at least a relevant SO answer
that is the first thing that comes up when you google a problem or error
message.

I know that isn't exactly what this question was measuring but I'd expect
engagement for Ruby in general to fall on SO. Compare that to the current wild
wild west of JS frameworks where everyone seems to be doing their own thing.

------
eranation
Very happy to see Scala both in the "Loved" and also in the "top salaries in
US", and same goes for Apache Spark. I made a bet on Scala more than 5 years
ago and it finally starts to pay off... although the Scala job pool is only a
fraction of the JS one.

~~~
hellofunk
Here I thought it was referring to the Spark programming language.

------
michaelmior
> JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even
> Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language.

I'm not convinced this conclusion applies to the software development
community as a whole. s/earth/Stack Overflow/

~~~
baldfat
I read it as: "Man, I better get over my hatred of JavaScript." (Started when
building front ends to databases in 1999. Haven't really looked back and that
is 100% my fault.

~~~
p4wnc6
I disagree. I'd much rather be forced to learn an entirely new profession and
leave coding all together than to be required to write Javascript
professionally.

One thing this survey doesn't really touch on is the way the rise of
Javascript is related to a fall in software quality. We write a lot more code
now. More people write code. And a lot of that code sucks and it's a shame
someone foolishly considers it productive labor output. And a lot of _that_
code, the sucky stuff, is Javascript.

Refusal to use Javascript is still a signal of a smart and quality-focused
developer. Similar to refusal to use Mongo.

I wish the SO survey didn't just measure what tech is popular among employers
or what tech is paid well. Employers are notorious for incorrectly investing
in the wrong tech, shoehorning things in, and declaring 'victory' when they
deploy a bug-ridden, 1-star app or something. That kind of situation, which is
common, should be down-weighted in the survey results, if only it were easier
to collect that data.

~~~
m90
Cool story, bro, spread the gospel. Better keep people from easy access to
programming and enjoy the beautiful software we had in the 90ies.

~~~
p4wnc6
The same phenomena existed in the 90s. Enterprise and corporate bureaucracy
will always be the main driver in terms of which skill sets appear most in-
demand. They have been since the dawn of computing.

The modern misguided infatuation with Javascript is just another boring
chapter in the same repeated story. In 15 years it will be something else.

My point isn't to convince anyone of anything. Indeed, most people who just
want a job and just don't care will simply comply with whatever is popularized
by enterprise bureaucracy.

But _thoughtful_ people ought to remember there's no need for anxiety. Great
developers survived the 90s and made lots of money without ever writing a
single line of Java or enterprise C++. Great developers survived the 00's and
made a lot of money without ever writing a line of enterprise C# or even ever
opening Visual Studio.

And great developers will survive the 2010s and 2020s and make a lot of money
without ever writing a line of Javascript.

~~~
manyxcxi
So... If one was a great developer through the 90s to today and didn't write
C++, C#, Java, or a line of JavaScript, what the hell were they writing? PHP?
Perl?

Great developers are great because they love what they do, they're critical
thinkers, and they've got an ability to find creative solutions to problems.
Great developers are not great because they hate 'the man' and refuse to write
code in the languages put forth by 'the bureaucracy'.

Bureaucrats didn't invent any of these languages or technologies. Developers
(some of them great) did. You know who guides technology platforms in
companies? The developers and the software architects. If Java and C# couldn't
get the job done well for writing services and applications, nobody would use
them.

If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs in
the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be
using something else.

People that stand on the sidelines bitching about how GREAT PEOPLE don't do
that without joining the fray and making it great to work with them often get
left behind and forgotten.

Help make it better or get out of the way, but it's not a conspiracy by Big
Company bureaucrats to trick us into creating the most engaging applications
deployed to the most users easier than we've ever had it.

~~~
p4wnc6
> If JavaScript wasn't the best we had available to us to create dynamic UIs
> in the biggest distribution platform in the history of civilization, we'd be
> using something else.

This is circular: "Because we use the thing, it's the best. If it weren't the
best, we wouldn't use it. We use it because it's the best."

Companies use non-best things all the time, even when the better options are
cheaper, easier, faster, safer, etc. Political control, gate keeping,
nepotism, kickbacks, drumming up showy re-orgs and migrations and initiatives
for short-term executive bonus optimization ... there are endless reasons why
executives and management couldn't care less what "the best" solutions look
like and will use unequivocally crap solutions, solutions that are
demonstrably wasteful and inefficient, if it gets them their short term bonus
or promotion, or whatever.

> Help make it better or get out of the way...

Complaining is perhaps the most useful tool there is for effecting positive
social change. It's not only helpful, but _necessary_ and _vital_ that we keep
whining incessantly about how unreasonably poor a tool Javascript is, and how
most of the work people choose to do with it or choose to invest in is clouded
by mistaken impressions about the usefulness of that work.

Most of what we have done to the "biggest distribution platform in history" is
to utterly destroy the value it held, to make it a cumbersome, psychologically
manipulative stream of _noise_ that, while still providing value, doesn't
provide nearly as much value as it could _if we just simply stopped fucking it
up with poor web development priorities_.

It seems we won't rest until there's an ad tagged to every single transmitted
bit. And we can't slow down at all, lest short term bonuses be lost, so we
have to evolve our way to every-bit-an-ad using whatever bad tools there are
now (Javascript) as opposed to stepping back a bit to think critically about
what we're doing, and what good tools would be to actually solve the problems
we _should_ solve.

Instead, libertarian brogrammer founders and VCs just spew Randian nonsense
that no, this is the market economics, and if every-bit-an-ad via bad
Javascript is what makes money, then it must be what the world at large wants.
Ugh...

~~~
manyxcxi
You still never answered the question. What languages does a great programmer
write in? All I've heard is what would exclude someone.

------
fweespee_ch
> The average developer is 29.6 years old. The median is 27.

Does anyone else find this concerning given all the talk of age bias in tech?

~~~
minionslave
Older devs probably don't use SO as much, because they are the one who built
the great tools. They built the techology stackoverflow was based upon, they
didn't need SO when they were developing in the 80s, 90s. they probably don't
need it now.

~~~
CaptSpify
Also: If you've spent 10+ years on a language/system, you aren't gonna need to
ask questions nearly as much

~~~
fweespee_ch
Tbh, I haven't posted to SO in years but I participated in their survey.

------
hjalle
Finding it a little suprising that C# is still decreasing in popularity,
despite Microsofts recent efforts:

2013 - 44.7%

2014 - 37.6%

2015 - 31.6%

2016 - 30.9%

~~~
phhlho
I wonder if it's actually decreasing in popularity or StackOverflow is just
becoming increasingly popular with other languages.

Looking at the number of responses to that question, there are lots more
people taking the survey in the last two years!

2013 - 8042

2014 - 6537

2015 - 21982

2016 - 49397

------
derrickdirge
>We’ll also be keeping commas outside quotation marks, because that’s what
developers do.

+1

This syntax feels so right to me, but I feel bad about myself when I use it.
No longer!

------
rfrey
Half of all respondents have 5 years experience or less. That seems likely to
colour a lot of the other responses.

------
whybroke
Apparently the last 15 years of your working life you will be more rare than a
woman programmer (3% vs 5.8%)

It is absolutely fantastic the gender issue is being thought about at long
last.

But it is absolutely horrifying the ageism issue is not. Or worse, is as
glibly explained away as past discrimination used to be.

~~~
kibwen
It might also be partly explained by selection bias among SO's audience. At my
first real job there was no other developer there below 40, and a few
approaching retirement age (indeed, I was brought on to replace a developer
who had retired). But I was the only one who used SO, and really the only one
who turned to the internet for answers at all rather than reaching for the
books on their shelves.

(And also, our proportion of female developers was way, way higher than 5%.)

Older developers are certainly out there, but they're woefully
underrepresented in open source.

------
vdaniuk
Atom adoption among SO developers increased from 2% in 2015 to 12% in 2016. VS
Code is at 7.2% and it's not even out of beta.

Both Atom and VS Code are built on Electron so it seems that web tech for
building code editors and IDEs is getting really popular.

------
dionidium
_" 95% of developers identify as either a Developer, Programmer, Engineer,
Senior Developer or Full-Stack Developer. Embedded Application Developers are
most likely to identify as Engineers. Graphics Programmers are most likely to
identify as Programmers.

But Developer is the runaway choice here. It’s our top choice, too."_

Good. This has always been a very silly thing to have to argue about. The
people who care a lot about this topic are saying more about themselves by
caring so much than any of the above titles would say about what they do.

------
Cshelton
II. Most Loved

1\. Rust 2\. Swift

That's interesting and cool. I have to agree myself.

~~~
jinst8gmi
Most loved top 5:

1\. Rust

2\. Swift

3\. F#

4\. Scala

5\. Go

~~~
myth_drannon
I would say "Most Hyped", perception of what we love is shaped by the internet
opinions. I doubt many people do Rust as part of their job or even hobby
projects. On the other hand Sharepoint and Objective-C is part of our day to
day routine...

~~~
hhandoko
I... Love Scala.

It's just a really flexible language, while it has its warts, I feel they
almost got it in combining the best of FP and OO.

I was a SharePoint developer in previous life. End-users love SharePoint, but
it's a headache to maintain and debug. I think there is only a very small use-
case where you will actually need some *.wsp developed. I use Nintex Workflow
+ Forms the rest of the time.

That being said, SharePoint devs gets paid well :)

------
shawkinaw
What I want to know is, how many pennies were in the piggy bank? My guess was
176.

~~~
benjaminhodgson
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-
sur...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/315181/developer-survey-how-
many-pennies-were-there)

~~~
shawkinaw
Damn, I was way off. Guess I badly misjudged my spherical pig radius.

------
SloopJon
I see QA broken out as an occupation type in several graphs, including 11.6%
of women. Overall, however, it's apparently lumped into Other, which would put
it at less than the 0.1% who are BI or data warehousing experts, or machine
learning developers. Really? No XY QA on SO?

Pretty sure the math doesn't add up, though:

* 5.8% of the 56,033 respondents were women

* 49,525 overall specified an occupation type, so let's assume 88% of the women did as well

* 11.6% of the women specified QA

* .1% overall specified machine learning

That's 56033 * .058 * .116 * .88 ~ 331 women QA alone, compared to 49525 *
.001 ~ 49 machine learning developers.

------
vehementi
If 10% identify as Ninja, and 17% of ninjas use windows phone, that seems to
contradict this:

> We received 59 responses from Windows Phone Mobile Developers (.1%).

~~~
hhandoko
It's users vs developers.

1.7% of respondents are WP users (10% x 17%), and only 0.1% of respondents are
WP developers.

------
santiagobasulto
I don't see a lot of Ruby. What's going on?

~~~
seren
Ruby is part of the "Losers" in the Trending Tech. But so is Rust that is also
the most Loved. The trend is only the number of upvotes in a topic year to
year.

But this is always hard to interpret : does it mean that all basic questions
have been asked so there is less activity or is it due to a drop in questions
because lack of interest ?

~~~
myth_drannon
Better proxy of a need/popularity for particular tech would be stats of
stackoverflow careers tags not the questions

------
bobisme
I'm surprised average hours per week or per year wasn't on the list. This also
just confirms how grossly underpaid I am.

------
jonesb6
If 10% of developers on SO are students, and 2.5% graduate every year, does
that mean every 10 years the population of developers increases by 25%? Do 25%
of developers retire every 10 years?

~~~
kabouseng
Well actually close. If you have 40 years of productive work in you (20 years
to 60 then retirement), then yes every 10 years 25% of the workforce does
retire.

But I would guess that those 10% of students are heavily skewed to students in
their final year of study. Second point is that not all undergraduate courses
are 4 years, some are 3 years, so probably closer to 7.5% of students on SO
graduate every year.

Which might indicate that the software development field is growing in terms
of people active in the field.

*Then again software development is a young persons game, so "retirement" out of the industry might be higher since a lot of people will retire to other fields / management positions.

------
executesorder66
> Worldwide, developers with Masters degrees have the highest average salary.
> Developers with industry certifications and PhDs are also paid more than
> most other developers. Stay in school, kids

But in the graph masters was second to "mentorship program"

Can someone give an example of one of these programs? Is this just another
name for an internship?

------
jorgecurio
hey guys I want to learn node.js, and react.js where's a good primer on
learning these things along with javascript fundamentals?

