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Comment by cbanek | Hacker News Reader

"17% of developers worked with AI or machine learning in 2017."

Really? That seems very high to me. Although maybe developers are a smaller pool than I thought (is making a website still development these days)? Also, same for the number of people who think PHP is #1 language (27%) (next, python 24%).

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Given it's a DigitalOcean survey and the data was collected from customers and via social media sites, it could always be sampling bias. The people who answer surveys are generally a much smaller group than the population at large, and usually more on the 'enthusiast' side of things. Add how they got the data from social media sites like Reddit (according to their blog post), and well, it's quite possible the people they surveyed are simply the minority that go on Reddit, read Hacker News and keep up to date with tech news rather than the majority of the developer/software engineer population. I mean, the majority of this industry doesn't consist of convention goers, open source hobbyists and hackers, it consists of people for whom software engineering is a day job in the same way as retail/finance/sales is for others.

I came here to say that. These numbers are absurd. There is no way almost 1/5 developers have worked with AI in the last year . And equally unlikely that 3/4 developers who don't use it plan to learn next year.

Maybe there is a feature of the population I'm missing? I can see it maybe being, for example, 75% of API / middle tier developers (big maybe). But I know exactly 0 front-end developers that plan to learn AI next year.

genuinely curious, why would making website not be development? you mean using wix/squarespace ? or something else?

It would be but if 90% of you are coding is website frontends or CRUD like back ends then your skill set is fairly limited and you wouldn't be thinking about learning AI.

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