
Developer Survey Results 2019 - m90
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019
======
sagitariusrex
_We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work
they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say
they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This
is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered
this question, to put it mildly._

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-
pro...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-profile-_-
all-of-the-developers-are-above-average)

~~~
Squid_Tamer
I'm not so sure about this conclusion. I feel that below-average developers
are less likely to answer stack overflow surveys at all. In my anecdotal
experience, below-average devs usually have little interest in interacting
with the overall "developer community" or reading about development more than
the absolute minimum needed to finish their assigned tasks.

~~~
justwalt
That was my takeaway as well. It’s also somewhat ambiguous; who are you
comparing yourself to? All coworkers, everyone in your graduating class,
people the same age as you?

I’m sure that we’re seeing at least a bit of everyone thinking they’re more
skilled than they are, but it’s more slight than that caption would lead you
to believe.

------
hashberry
Drupal and jQuery are now the top two "Most Dreaded Web Frameworks," with Ruby
on Rails and Angular.js trailing.[0]

[0]
[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-
_-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-web-frameworks)

~~~
preek
Interestingly Rails is also high in the “wanted” and “loved” section. To each
their own preference, right?(;

------
w-m
Will People Born Today Have a Better Life Than Their Parents?

> Respondents in China are the most optimistic, and those in regions like
> Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East are especially hopeful
> compared to those in Western Europe. This is especially notable in countries
> like France and Germany, which are the 4th and 7th largest economies in the
> world, respectively.

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-
pro...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-profile-_-
will-people-born-today-have-a-better-life-than-their-parents)

The bottom fifteen countries in this question are all European countries +
Turkey + North America + Australia.

(France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, UK, Canada,
Turkey, Austria, US, Sweden, Australia, Denmark).

Yikes. Didn't realize so many people around here do think that things are
going downhill.

~~~
yossi_peti
It makes sense that more developed countries would have lower optimism. If the
previous generation already had a decent quality-of-life, there's less reason
to assume that the next generation will have it even better. Developing
countries are more likely to have significant recent salient difficulties that
the next generation will no longer have.

~~~
w-m
> If the previous generation already had a decent quality-of-life, there's
> less reason to assume that the next generation will have it even better.

I do agree that the rate of improvement may be lower for already highly
developed countries. And that the difficulties solved in developing countries
may have a much larger positive impact then small steps in more developed
countries.

But there's no artificial upper limit to quality-of-life. You wont hit a
barrier and be forced to stagnate and go down: there's so many issues in
today's societies that need solving.

~~~
kohtatsu
I imagine you are both right: the apples are farther up the tree.

------
klohto
Wish the full CSV results were available already as I use them to negotiate my
salary since they're much more reliable and up to date than Glassdoor.

~~~
breakpointalpha
I think I'm about to go into the offer phase with a company. I've already been
told by the recruiter that the salary is 80k. Looking at the Python results,
I'm honestly thinking about sending them this dev survey. Like, "just so we're
clear, you are intentionally underpaying?"

~~~
scarface74
It doesn’t work like that. There are so many variables that go into
compensation like experience and location that you can’t really look at the
average for an entire country across all experience levels.

------
ngrilly
The adoption of Visual Studio Code by a large part of the respondents in just
a few years is impressive (initial release was in April 2015).

------
ggregoire
Interesting to see a static typed language growing on the frontend, while
Python is now the most popular backend language.

~~~
islon
Maybe because the backend is getting dumber and dumber (micro/nano services)
while the frontend is getting more complex (SPAs, almost like desktops apps).

And I say this as a backend developer who makes these dumb backends that are
little more than a glorified layer over postgres.

------
ajknzhol
It's interesting to see VSCode come to top in every section.

~~~
kgwxd
Phase 2 is nearly complete.

~~~
fxfan
And what would the Phase 2 of your pointless FUD be? You do realize that LSP
was created by Microsoft, right? And it's pretty much the standard for
language and editor integration right now.

~~~
asark
Just explaining, not taking a side: it's probably a reference to "embrace,
extend, and extinguish". So "phase 2" is "extend".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

~~~
fxfan
I understand, which is what I call FUD by the parent commenter. There is no
such policy going on.

~~~
asark
Oh, sorry. You asked what Phase 2 would be and I didn't pick up that it was a
rhetorical question.

~~~
fxfan
No worries! Thanks for trying to help in good faith! :)

------
mlthoughts2018
Bittersweet to see how much “distracting work environment” is reported to
reduce productivity, given that companies abjectly refuse to provide private &
quiet workspaces despite it being unequivocally cost effective to do so even
for most start-ups in dense urban centers.

I continue to find the discussion of salary disappointing though. The survey
provides a good opportunity for more detailed information.

~~~
asark
People selling stuff (to clients, to investors) think having a big open room
full of developers using computers is impressive enough to help them sell. The
developer zoo.

A normal professional office with hallways and doors doesn't look that
impressive, or might but only if dedicated lobby and (client) meeting areas
have had some real money & space dedicated to them.

~~~
mattferderer
In recent consulting scenarios, the clients seemed to feel that leaving
developers alone in quiet areas was preferred. Though they had a direct
connection to the software being built for their needs compared to someone who
is looking to be woo'd & awed.

------
jandrewrogers
It is probably worth pointing out that this survey is very web/mobile
developer centric. If you surveyed systems/core developers -- the people who
designed/wrote many of the tools used by developers in this survey -- the
survey results would distribute quite differently.

~~~
micah94
Laughably so...I once spoke to a software engineer that wrote systems for
fighter jets and I didn't recognize any terms or acronyms of any tech he used
on a daily basis.

------
napsterbr
Very interesting. I wish there was an easy way to compare results with
previous years.

Surprised to see BSD usage at only 0.1%. I know it would be a small percentage
but I'd expect 1-2%.

~~~
snazz
Presumably, the people who fill out the survey are a very specific cross-
section of the industry. Those who use a BSD are much less likely to answer a
SO survey than a survey from a site with more BSD users, which makes it
virtually impossible to get reasonable data.

~~~
8draco8
Why would that be? Stackoverflow is pretty broad forum and have BSD questions
and answers as well. In opinion it's that BSD is very rarely used by people.
Linux is doing majority of work better than BSD so it's required only by very
small part of the market.

------
troquerre
Really surprised the sentiment towards blockchain is so positive. Just goes to
show how much of an echo chamber HN can be.

------
montenegrohugo
"Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time
they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender."

This really surprises me. Is it that common to take programming classes in
high school? I suppose nowadays it is, but can anyone else confirm that was
the case 10-20 years ago?

~~~
jandrewrogers
In my experience, virtually all people who learned programming as children
were self-taught. This was definitely the case 10-20 years ago and I don't
think it has declined that much.

Maybe this is an American perspective, but I was surprised that anyone would
assume children are primarily learning programming in classes. Even today, I
know several elementary school children who have programming as a hobby --
they are learning on their own using the Internet for the most part.

~~~
scarface74
I went to a magnet middle school in small town south GA in 1988 where we had
an Applesoft Basic programming course. All of the public high schools also had
elective Basic courses while I was in school.

From the best I can tell, teaching programming in was a thing in the mid 80s
to mid 90s and then declined

[http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/01/kappan_kafai.ht...](http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/09/01/kappan_kafai.html)

------
ege_erdogan
Would be better visually if bars' lengths were interactively changing as you
switched tabs, like what Hackerrank does.[1]

[1] [https://research.hackerrank.com/student-
developer/2018](https://research.hackerrank.com/student-developer/2018)

------
jblaine
This is an error: "About 65% of professional developers on Stack Overflow
contribute to open source projects once a year or more."

The data above it adds up to 35.5%.

------
robertcorey
I think they really dropped the ball by grouping Angular and AngularJS
together.

------
dustinmoris
I found it quite surprising that Azure is the least used and most dreaded
cloud of the three major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) among all
respondents, despite Stack Overflow being heavily C# and .NET biased.

~~~
mattferderer
SO was heavily C# & .NET biased in its earlier years. I'm not sure that is
still the case in platform usage. Also not sure if that's the case on this
survey as C# was just barely above PHP & was less than half of JS in terms of
respondents. JavaScript, Python & Java were all higher.

------
awaythrow12348
Advice on moving over to dev ops from web dev?

------
pastor_elm
surprised how few people use Microsoft SQL Server. I guess most people don't
work with databases at all?

~~~
enraged_camel
Microsoft SQL server ain’t free to use in production.

~~~
coldacid
Express edition is, but it's core, memory, and DB-size limited.

