
Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2017 - kenrick95
http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/
======
flurdy
Shows you effects of the echo chamber you are in, as I was very surprised that
Scala was only at 3.6%, and beaten by Go at 4.3 and Swift at 6.5% in the
programming language section.

The self-selection of people I follow on Twitter, the meetups and conferences
I attend, the choice of companies and colleagues I have worked with, etc,
probably just reinforce my blinkered echo chamber. This is probably true for
many Haskell, Rubyist, Go people and others as well.

By heart, I would have guessed 20% Scala usage, but in my head, I do know of
the floods of javascript misuse across the world, the legions of java
developers in every country and location, having been one myself once. And I
guess my current location of London which I feel use Scala more than most
places and mixing a lot with startups does affect my expectations of what
everyone else use elsewhere.

[[http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-
pr...](http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-programming-
languages)]

~~~
peterjlee
Visual Studio is the most used IDE and somehow I don't know a single person
who uses Visual Studio.

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

~~~
thirdsun
Not only that, but it seems to be most used IDE in the web development
category. I had to make sure they didn't mean Visual Studio Code, which
appeared a few positions further down though.

------
matt_s
I think there is severe bias in their results simply because of the content in
stack overflow and the people that visit.

For example, the data on a lot of developers only having 1-3 years of
programming experience. That would naturally follow that a majority of active
users on a Q&A site would not have much experience, right?

Same can be said for data about what technologies are represented - JavaScript
was at the top of "Most Popular Technologies". There is a lot of churn in JS
frameworks... which probably leads to a lot of questions for inexperienced
programmers... which would visit the site more frequently.

There definitely are some good results in there - I would just take anything
regarding popularity with a grain of salt. I also suspect the population of
people taking the survey don't fully represent all software developers
equally. People that are in a stable role using "unpopular" or proprietary
technology have no use for stack overflow.

~~~
Kiro
I agree. Anecdotal but I used to visit SO all the time during my first years
as a programmer compared to now where I only need it occasionally. It was also
a long time ago I posted an actual question.

~~~
steveklabnik
> It was also a long time ago I posted an actual question.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's about your experience, that is, as more and
more questions are asked and answered, it is more likely that an answer
already exists, so you don't need to ask a new question.

------
aedron
I think the survey makes a very fundamental mistake in chucking a lot (the
majority) of developers under the umbrella 'web developer'. I know they also
had subdivisions (frontend, backend, full stack), but in the entire survey
they are represented as one category.

Those are fundamentally different roles. Someone working exclusively on
server-side applications has a totally different profile than someone working
exclusively with web frontend. Concepts, technologies, tools, everything
differs, and so probably does the personal profile of those developers.

------
manaskarekar
_Most Loved Language:_ Rust

 _Most Wanted Language:_ Python

It's good to see these two languages win out these categories! Good things lie
ahead (hopefully).

~~~
atulatul
Wikipedia updated with 2017 results:Rust won first place for "most loved
programming language" in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2016 and 2017.

Love the site.

------
SiVal
I'm surprised to see "platforms" as Win: 41%, Desktop Linux: 33%, Mac: 18.4%.
Presumably this question was about the machine you use to develop software on.

The reason I'm surprised has nothing to do with any advocacy. It's just that
whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference in the US (Web, for
example), it looks as though fewer than 1/5 of the machines are NON-Macs,
while the answer to the question above is the inverse: fewer than 1/5 of devs
use Macs. (Though multiple answers were allowed this still says that fewer
than 1/5 use Macs.)

So, I'm wondering: Are StackOverflow and US dev conf attendees significantly
different groups? (Ex: SO hobbyists very different from conference pros?) Or
do devs usually install Desktop Linux on Mac hardware, and I don't realize
that half of the Macs laptops I see are running Linux? Or do people use PC
desktop hardware for development but use Mac laptops for portable use (ex:
attending a conference, but they would still qualify as Mac users)? Or are all
of the non-US conferences solid walls of PC hardware with so few Macs that
they overwhelm the Mac usage in the US? Or have things changed significantly
in the past few years? (I haven't been to a dev conference for a while.)

Or what? Presumably all of the above to some extent, but am I missing
something big?

~~~
kbart
Developers that attend conferences in USA are very small and biased subset of
total developers worldwide. For vast majority of developers attending a
conference in USA would cost few to several months worth of salary, so it's no
brainer. Not to mention bullish USA border controls that makes people
(especially non-white) think twice before traveling. I haven't seen many
developers using Macs outside of USA and few Western Europe countries.

~~~
shagie
The big / national tech conferences - yes. They are expensive. There are many
local or regional ones that are much less expensive.

I'm heading to a regional one in August that is registered as a nonprofit and
is less than a week's salary to attend (and I work in the public sector in the
Midwest so don't think that this is big left cost salary).

That said, even with a strong Microsoft bend to many session technologies,
macs still are several times more frequent than non-mac.

~~~
kbart
Plane tickets, travel, hotel, catering alone can easily add up to few thousand
dollars.

~~~
shagie
For the regional one I go to (That Conference), its about an hour each way.
$10 in gas/day or so? Since its close enough for a long commute, I don't have
to worry about a hotel (or plane tickets).

Since the conference isn't trying to pull in big bucks (its a break even -
501.C non profit even), attendee costs for 2017 are $425 (food included - and
they don't skimp on food). Even if you're going to add on the hotel the
conference is located in, its only $175. Toss in a plane ticket and it is
probably _still_ less expensive than the national ones for the "get in the
door" ticket.

There are lots of regional or local conferences that are not absurd in
pricing.

For another example of an upcoming local one:
[https://stirtrek.com](https://stirtrek.com) which is a one day $99 one. Its
draw is likewise local.

Yea, NoFluff is $1000 to walk in the door for two days. I'm very glad that
there are others that are closer in line with not needing to drain the
training budget to go to.

------
markatkinson
It is weird being a "desktop application" and mobile developer and knowing
that 70% of developers do something that I am completely unfamiliar with.

Web development to me feels like the Boneyard from the Lion King. This shadow
land that I am too terrified to enter into, and I have no idea why I feel this
way. It also bugs me like it might be a huge shortcoming at some point in my
life that I have no grasp of it.

~~~
k__
With me it's the other way around.

I can do almost anything I need with Web tech.

Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the
last century.

I'm doing a native mobile project next month, and looking at the stuff a iOS
dev needs to get going is horrible.

~~~
mbel
> Desktop or even native mobile development seems to be like going back to the
> last century.

The funny thing is that looking from the opposite perspective I feel the same.
The web development looks like going back to beginnings of programming and
reinventing everything again in the browser. You know, like when you read
about 'tree shaking' being cutting edge technology in JavaScript land, then
look at definition to realize that it's just dead code elimination that has
been done by linkers & compilers for ages.

~~~
k__
You're right, these optimisations are missing and all the fancy autocomplete
of the IDEs for typed languages that are used on the desktop are missing, too.

I don't know, maybe it just seems better to me, because I'm doing Web for so
long now.

When I see desktop/mobile with Qt, Java or C#, I see huge IDEs, runtime
environments and SDKs and with iOS even vendor lock-in, simulators and
whatnot.

When I see Web with JavaScript, I see tiny editors, browsers that are already
installed on every machine and bring all the SDKs and runtime environments,
fast iterations, a good package system and general simplicity.

------
provemewrong
Some observations.

Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching
yourself.

Oracle usage only 16.5%, but I guess it makes sense considering the web
developer proportion.

CoffeeScript as the third most dreaded language, behind only two instances of
Visual Basic. But reading the definition of "dreaded" in makes more sense.

Sharepoint as the most dreaded platform, ha ha, no surprise there.

Clojure as the top paying tech worldwide, wow. But missing entirely from the
list in US, UK, Germany, France sections, so where are all the Clojure devs?
In general that's... comforting, if only there were any Clojure shops in my
country (okay, admittedly I've heard about one startup using it).

~~~
skrebbel
> Wouldn't have thought of built-in help as a popular (47.1%) way of teaching
> yourself.

The built-in help for eg Java, C# or Delphi is amazing. It starts with
autocomplete, then a tooltip with a summary, and full details including
examples are just an F1 away.

------
stephenr
I can't find the actual questions, so if anyone can reference them it may help
to understand the answers more.

The "platform" part is at best ambiguous and at worst white noise.

It covers mobile & desktop OS's, "cloud" providers - both IaaS like AWS/Azure
& SaaS like Salesforce - hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi and Arduino,
buzzwords like "Serverless" and mainframe.

Apparently all of those things represent a "platform" that is in some way
comparable, but Linux, BSD and Windows servers do not.

The "most popular languages" shows Javascript as the most popular with
Sysadmin/DevOps.

I'm going to just assume the people answering subscript to the idea that
"DevOps === Developers Doing Ops" (aka NoOps). I'm pretty confident _actual_
Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than anything else.

~~~
dagw
_I 'm pretty confident actual Sysadmins don't use/prefer Javascript more than
anything else._

I think that question was multiple choice. My guess is that most sysadmins use
their favorite language and a bit of JavaScript when they have to, and since
they all have different favorite languages javascript ends up 'winning'

~~~
stephenr
> most sysadmins use their favourite language and a bit of JavaScript

I think more likely is that every nodejs developer considers themselves
"devops".

------
ljw1001
I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite
of its minimal use. Many of the ideas developed for Smalltalk are now
commonplace, so I'm guessing that it's the careful integration of those ideas
that makes it special.

It is my favorite language, btw. :)

~~~
m0sa
Probably because it (still) pays so well? [1]

[1]: [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-
salary-a...](http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-salary-and-
experience-by-language)

~~~
travmatt
I saw that too and wondered if it wasn't an artifact of history - when I think
of smalltalk I think of peter norvig and people of his stature. Maybe the high
smalltalk developer salary means it's probably used by older and very
experienced developers.

------
andy-wu

      We will publish additional analysis related to respondents’ disability status in the coming weeks.
    

As a student with a severely limiting physical disability, I'm looking forward
to this. I'm really interested to see what roles those in my position are in.

~~~
GuiA
Would love to read about your experiences, if you are willing to share :)

------
ihsw2
Is gender and ethnic background of developers relevant?

~~~
tclancy
Of course it is. Homogeneity is dangerous for an ecosystem and even if it
weren't, not all apps, websites, products of code are consumed by straight
white guys living on the US coasts. A mix of perspectives is a healthy thing.

~~~
justaman
I like to think that since white guys are generally the most universally hated
group by other race\gender combo's, white guys just dont really care who you
are as long as you get the job done. Thats why they have the lowest interest
in diversity.

~~~
ihsw2
That's blatantly racist.

~~~
justaman
Its really not. Care to explain why?

------
gtrubetskoy
> "We estimate that 16.8 million of these people are professional developers
> and university-level students."

I wonder if it is relatively safe to infer from this that there are ~16.8
million developers in the world? Are there developers who never visit
stackoverflow? I'd expect that number to be higher, even though 16.8M is a
lot.

Also if you take all "years since learning to code" up to "9-10", they add up
to 50.6%, which means that the developer population doubles every ~10 years.
Though I have heard elsewhere (I think it was a talk by "uncle Bob") that the
developer population doubles every 5 years, not 10.

Edit: Ha, interestingly his data was also based on stackoverflow:
[http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html](http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html) ...now does this mean the rate of growth is
slowing?

~~~
vmasto
Note that this data excludes the vast majority of Chinese software engineers
(they represent just 0.4666% of the total survey responders)

------
aedron
Most loved platform:

    
    
        ...
        iOS (62%)
        Android (61.6%)
        ...
    

Most wanted platform:

    
    
        Android (20.6%)
        ...
        iOS (13.2%)
    

Android and iOS neck-a-neck for currently used, but Android far ahead as
future platform?

------
amelius
Some things that stand out:

\- The "web" is not a platform?

\- France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe?

\- People who work for a small company usually have many roles, so asking
people to pick their role in a single-choice way seems not right.

~~~
hoschicz
> \- France pays $10k less than Germany? US pays twice that of Europe?

Yes, France has higher taxation and politically leans left, even compared to
Europe. That's weighted out by strong labor laws.

------
erikb
About the "ship it (optimize later)" point: The interpretation seems to
completely opposite to the data. It seems most people seem to disagree with
it.

It's also most reasonable from experience. Everybody experience stuff that is
supposed to be optimized later but then never gets revisited until it's
rewritten completely 20 years later (again with the idea to just ship it of
course).

------
randomname2
Surprisingly a full 2.6% of Stack Overflow visitors identify as non
male/female, of which a 0.5% transgender. Both numbers much higher than those
for the general population.

It would be interesting to see more information about this, looking forward to
the follow-up article: "We will publish additional analysis related to
respondents’ gender identities in the coming weeks."

~~~
pluma
Based on my experience both in developer communities and outside of them, I
don't find that surprising. While it is evidently true that there are
disproportionately more men in tech, it also seems to be true that there are
more queer/trans/non-conforming people in tech.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are actually higher: assuming the
choices are exclusive, the way they are worded it's not clear how transgender
is intended to be represented in the results. Not everyone who is transgender
sees their "trans" status as a distinct gender identity (i.e. the emphasis in
"trans-woman" or "trans-man" doesn't have to fall on the "trans" aspect). I
think a clearer distinction would have been a separate question "my gender
identity matches the gender I was assigned at birth" (instead of
distinguishing between male, female and "trans") but that might have
overcomplicated things.

~~~
k__
Yes, most female developers I know are trans women.

------
tannhaeuser
The "Years of coding experience" statistics are interesting in a number of
ways IMHO. Is there an interpretation why it doesn't go down linearly, but has
up and down micro-cycles? Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding
experience just an artifact of not assessing answers with over 20 years of
experience at finer granularity?

~~~
pc86
> Is the bump at "more than 20 years" of coding experience just an artifact of
> not assessing answers with over 20 years of experience at finer granularity?

I would think so. If someone started a programming job right out of school
(~22 years old), and is still programming today, that would be any developer
who is ~43 or older. I would say at least 1/4-1/3 of my former and current
colleagues would fall into that age bracket. Not all of them started
programming out school but many of them did for sure.

------
mherrmann
I wonder why age was not included?

------
johnlbevan2
Suggestion: Add automated machine info collection to the Developer Survey

A suggestion to improve the amount of data available in future surveys without
adding to the manual collection effort, provide a facility to automatically
collect workstation/environment info in a parsable format for consumption by
the survey:
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/345859/361842)

------
raulk
The "languages over time" section [1] is overrepresenting Javascript. It shows
separate charts for JS and node.js, when the latter is not a language but a
runtime environment.

I would love to see the chart for Go instead of Javascript twice.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-
la...](http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#technology-languages-
over-time)

------
eddd
How is it possible that

"When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job,
53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers,
63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say
they’re full-time remote or almost all the time."

And only a few percent of companies hires remote?

~~~
wyldfire
The most likely explanation is that the distribution sampled doesn't match the
distribution from which you drew "only a few percent of companies hires
remote".

But it's also possible that people have different opinions on what "almost all
the time" means.

------
cholantesh
People have discussed in the past that SO's user base is heavily biased
towards web/mobile/database (including ETL) development. Are there any
competitors to this survey that would be more holistic/diverse in its view of
the industry?

------
banterfoil
Students' Expected Salaries was the most surprising section for me. As a US
soon to be grad, those numbers seemed surprisingly low. Perhaps the numbers
are a lot less outside the US? I don't even think I could find a dev position
that pays $30,000.

~~~
swarmerab
You do realize that there are developers in poor/developing countries, right?
$500/month is considered a decent salary for junior devs where I'm from.

------
dostoevsky
Interesting how "Knowledge of algorithms and data structures" is the third
most important thing developers think should be prioritized when recruiting
(3.77/5), following communication skills and track record.

------
ryandrake
It would have been nice to see more of the long tail of Years Since Learning
to Code and Years Coding Professionally. Wonder why they chose to not ask for
the distribution after 20 years?

------
sriram_iyengar
Loved the gif question :)

------
perseusprime11
I can't wait for somebody to send me a screenshot of the salaries and ask me
why are we paying $150K when StackOverflow says we can find people for $58K.

------
komali2
Who's the elected officials that are using stack overflow? I really wish they
had put more info up about that.

------
zerr
Glad to see desktop development is still kicking (28.9%) but remote jobs are
very rare...

------
brilliantcode
even north koreans uses stackoverflow!

------
sebastianconcpt
Smalltalk <3

------
flurdy
43% prefer tabs? Get out!

[[http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-
or-...](http://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/#work-tabs-or-spaces)]

~~~
m0sa
The problematic ones are the 19.3% who prefer both...

~~~
parroquiano
On the contrary, those of us who prefer both are the smart ones[0]

[0]
[https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs)

~~~
rejschaap
That's too complicated for the unwashed masses

------
aikorevs
Just learned that:

Most Popular Languages by Occupation

    
    
      For Sysadmin / DevOps no 1 is JavaScript
      For Data Scientist / Engineer no 1 is JavaScript

~~~
darekkay
This is a little bit misleading. This was a multiple choice question, so it's
understable that most people have used JavaScript in some way within their
projects. This doesn't mean, that JavaScript ist the most used language in
those categories by the time spent using it.

~~~
thefarseeker
That was my takeaway too. If you ever had to change a spelling error in the
front-end of a devopsy-style tool, then chances are you wrote some javascript,
and bam: top of the list.

------
garganzol
Survey has a particular flaw: it lists ".NET Core" technology, but it's a
vaporware (e.g. not a real thing). It should be corrected to ".NET".

~~~
garganzol
For those who cannot grasp the point:

1\. .NET Core is on 4th year of development

2\. Breaking changes from version to version

3\. The absence of release culture. The approach of .NET Core team is to bodge
together something with a scotch tape, then call it a release. Yep, they are
even lazy enough to eliminate words like "beta" or "preview" in their
"releases".

4\. Astronautic APIs. They are so minimal to the point they are useless

5\. Does not provide a reliable way of doing things. "You can attach any
configuration provider you want"... Yeah, the truth is nobody wants any,
everybody wants the one that works as a basic requirement.

6\. Documentation is scarce and is totally useless. Yep, I know how that
method is called, thank you. What I really need is the description of what it
does, how it does it, and code samples. But what you get now is a large page
of HTML per class full of some obvious statements like "Method void GetState()
- Gets the state.". They call it documentation. I call it BS.

I can continue. But the point is that this is enough to kill the thing off.
.NET Core is already dead, but most people can't see it from the hyped bubble
walls.

~~~
cholantesh
Much of this is debatable, and none of it adds up to the platform being dead,
let alone 'vaporware'. It exists. It is in use. In production systems.

------
12389234
Javascript and Java reign supreme. No trendy wanky languages like the ones
mentioned on here all the time will ever be up there. Companies just pretend
they "use go" to attract the trendy people here, when in reality "use go"
means "there was a project once that we used go for" and 99% of their code is
javascript and java.

~~~
thefarseeker
Not sure if trolling or... but fwiw at Stack Overflow's SRE team we use Go a
_lot_. We just open-sourced our latest tool written in Go, DNSControl
([https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/](https://github.com/StackExchange/dnscontrol/)),
and we have dozens of internal tools and software written in Go.

Not to mention other open-source tools like Grafana, InfluxDB, or Cockroachdb.

I agree with you that Java and JavaScript will reign supreme for years to
come. Just pointing out that not all of us think that's a good thing, and
there is plenty of variety out there, in the real world.

