Developer Survey Results

> Cool to see Redis to be in top position.

For those of us using it for many years now, it’s not surprising at all. Thanks antirez!

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

StackOverflow could infer quite a bit of this by cross referencing the demographics from their survey results (assuming it’s not stored anonymized) with public profile information from GitHub.

It wouldn’t reflect the whole picture but, for a lot of major projects that are hosted there, one could see the engagement vs usage ratios.

Technically, almost anybody that has a GitHub account could claim to be contributing to OSS. I've got a dozen or more projects that almost no one has ever looked at besides myself, but they are public, and they do have an MIT license slapped on top of them, so I could torture myself into claiming that they are open source projects.

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%.

The love for Redis seems almost the only data point in this survey that makes factual sense. Because Redis is factually awesome (thanks, ect.). Everything else just feels weird (visual studio? 2% woman? 50% contribute to FOSS? none of that makes any sense to me).

I'm not surprised about the OSS contribution rate. I don't routinely contribute to major projects, but over five years ago I once rewrote substantial parts of the MySQL connector for an ORM we were contemplating using at work and got them merged just so we could demo it with support for some MySQL features we used. I also have a github with some really tiny public repos that people in super super niche roles might find useful. And of course I file bug reports and discuss features for projects I use routinely. Do I contribute to Open Source? Yes, I suppose. Am I a super active and dedicated contributor? Not really.

And I kind of think the above ballpark is where a lot of developers are.

> Btw surprised to see "contributing to OSS" at ~50%. Looks like an incredibly high number

Not every OSS project is massive and mature, like Linux or Firefox. I use a fair bit of OSS tools and libraries in my job and not all of them are highly polished. So when I run into an issue, I'll file a bug and usually supply a fix if I can.

Given the sheer volume of OSS out there and the ease with which one can make contributions, 50% seems surprisingly low to me. My best guess is that some developers are afraid to contribute.

Uploaded a one liner package to NPM = contributed to OSS.

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).

Were are you reading that? It's a long report but I wasn't able to find what you're referring to. Would be awesome if you could clarify!

Both you and SO are including the "it's out of date" category in your "side," that's why. Also their choice of wording is odd, I would have expected "Yes, but it's out of date." as opposed to "No, I have one but it's out of date."

it pleasantly surprises me that VS Code is leader in pretty much all Dev categories. I love VS Code.

Isn't much of that talk "hyped"?

I guess it depends on how people interpreted the question. For example, Vim is the default editor for git commits on some installations, so maybe some people already counted that in, even though they don't use it for other editing purposes.

It doesn't surprise me that much; I personally found it _way_ harder than Vim to get to grips with. Although I would have thought Spacemacs adoption might have pushed it up a little bit, as that was my entry point as a Vimmer.

Yeah, that's what I don't get from the Emacs crowd

The learning curve is anything but smooth for Emacs. For Vim, it's much easier (note I said VIM, I'm not wasting my time with pre-direction keys typing methods)

It took me 2 weeks to switch to vim. Now I rarely use the vim itself, but I use vim plugins in all IDEs. To be honest, I don't like vim's plugin infrastructure, scripting language and a lot of other things, but the core - composable single-key commands - is a gem.

Emacs I gave a try for a month, and I still felt like a beginner. There isn't a single core idea that you can master; it feels like it's a never ending series of chords that you have to remember for every plugin and lisp code that you have to write to configure and personalize everything for yourself. And pre-configured distributions like Spacemacs feel even more complex. Evil mode behaves like vim 95% of the time, but 5% leaves you buffled and completely, utterly lost.

Sometime in the future, when I have enough time on my hands, I will build myself an emacs build from scratch, learning every plugin as I go along. Right after I build my own linux distribution from scratch - oh wait, I already did that, and it took less time and mental space than Emacs.

vim is for when you want to edit anything in the console. Git commit? Vim. Quickly edit a config file? Vim. SSH'd into a server and need to check something? Vim.

Day to day coding ... VS Code. Used to be Emacs, but I switched.

Oh and Vim is still the only editor I dare use to open a 1GB CSV file with.

Is there still a Vim vs Emacs debate? There was, 20 years ago, but Vim made an entree (renaissance?) outside the old school Unix crowd 5 or 10 years ago, and since then, Vim users vastly outnumber Emacs users (in my highly unscientific observations).

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.

Often when I see a developer that I look up to actually work, they are on Emacs. Its definitely a small user base, but an influential one. I think if you were to limit the survey to readers of Hacker News, the proportion of Emacs users would be much higher.

Vim seems to be default installed on most Linux distributions, and Emacs isn't. If your work takes you across Linux servers, you're 99% sure to be "a Vim user" (in some capacity), regardless of what your daily programming environment is.

I prefer Emacs to Vim, but I prefer Idea for Java development over either, so since I mostly work on java projects on Linux servers, I actually use Vim significantly more than Emacs.

Emacs's power largely comes from what and how one would use Elisp. Though Emacs is a great editor in itself. But the true power of Emacs is to use Lisp and its power of Macros to convert Emacs into a AI code writing utility. In other words you write Elisp, and Elisp writes your code. Of course this also extends to the fact that you could eventually use Elisp to automate tasks in the software development workflow.

I think huge disservice has been done to Emacs to use it as an email browsing or as an project management utility. One could use Elisp and do all sorts of curious stuff inside the software development workflow itself.

But if you are using it for editing and for that purpose only, I can absolutely see why vim would be winning. Its just the best lightweight line editor out there.

vim is Git's default editor. Emacs isn't even installed by default on many system.

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.

That graph isn't showing years of experience vs. salary, it is showing average years of experience by role vs. salary. Most developers with more than 10 years experience are at the higher end (at least) of that graph, but those numbers just aren't what the graph represents.

For average salaries, why does this survey not display the sample size and variance of these mean estimates? Also, I doubt that mean estimates are the best measure, rather than medians. I say that since salary data is probably multi-modally distributed with some very high earners and a largely left-skewed distribution with many low earners who do the grunt work / are less experienced.

>>I personally think we, as a profession, need to kind of grow a backbone and step up our responsibility to no do harm.

Not possible in most companies where your career depends being a yes man to the management. You would be surprised how often doing the right thing gets people fired. Of course you could say 'grow spine' or whatever. But you can't suffer for ever in a ecosystem where everything is stacked against you.

At some point in putting food on the table takes precedence.

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).

You should certainly report it to the appropriate managers. But, ultimately, ethics is highly subjective: and it's not your choice. You've sold your time to the company and have to produce the products it makes: even if you don't like their ads or product. You can say no, they can fire you and hire someone just like you and the product would still get made.

Being a doctor or developer is entirely different. The doctor has much more freedom in deciding a course of action. As a developer you have very little power to decide what get's produced, because it's not your job function: that's what product managers are for.

Human beings have a tendency to overestimate our innate ethical abilities. The Milgram[1] and Stanford Prison[2] experiments are usual examples of how quickly and easily humans devolve into despicable behavior. We really only need a small nudge and most of us end up capable of being Holocaust interment camp guards. Recognizing your own enormous ability for evil is important or else you might easily end up acting on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

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.

I just graduated to the elite 0.3% group, '65 or older'. Like you I like being an outlier.

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

It's a good text editor, and when I'm working with lots of Dockerfiles and Terraform configurations it's replaced Atom and Notepad++ as my go-to editor. The JavaScript editor's not half bad either.

But for serious development, I don't think I'll be dropping Webstorm or Rider for it any time soon though.

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?

yeah those incomes are telling

This does not say only one degree. You might have a percentage that sums to more than 100% here.

People tend to put in the most relevant one anyway when given the exclusive choice.

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.

having interviewed over the years in NZ, I'd say its around 90% with degree.

But I've worked mainly in companies building quite technical products.

> Maybe that’s because I primarily work for startups

startups are only a teeny weeny blip on the scale of "code" companies. Mastodonts such as IBM, Atos, CapGemini, Sopra and a few other are alone more than multiple hundred thousand employees.

Yeah, most people in the industry don't work for startups.

You also have to consider this isn't an scientific survey, just a fun parlor game.

>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.

Perhaps the women that responded would rather get paid less than work in a bro culture because they find it unbearable, not because they don't value being compensated well.

Even more striking, "the diversity of the company or organization" is second last for women.

> The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and individual developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job.

So perhaps it's not the "tech industry" that's struggling, it's some vocal minority that would like to convince you it does.

> 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?

> you can be labeled as sexist

You'd have to take those data points in isolation and conclude "men like money more than women" to earn that label.

I don't think anyone is surprised to see evidence that an exclusive workplace culture contributes to the pay gap. I'd posit that all else being equal, women value compensation and culture about the same as men. The priorities reflected in the survey are a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

Just started my first Elixir project using Phoenix since I needed something that could handle a large message volume and scale. I'm a bit surprised how good it is!

I took the survey and think I remember not seeing Elixir as an option. I would have definitely voted for it.

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

Yeah i guess they don't include Rails as an option? Like other comment said, the survey probably didn't include Elixir as well, even though Elixir got a nice rank last year.

As a Rails developer, it's sad the number for Rails is far behind Django. This might make some confusion for people who are deciding which MVP framework to use.

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

This shows how much power opinions have.

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.

I think the "dreaded" category is quite complex and hard to interpret. People can dread a language for a bunch different reasons that aren't necessarily related to the attributes of the language, or even how much it is intrinsically liked. One is a class of language where people run into it incidentally without having any deep experience, but are forced to interact with it, and find it very unpleasant. Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin, but also one of the most dreaded languages, I think because there's a large number of people whose only encounter with it ever is when there's something wrong with their Gradle script that they can't figure out. Coffeescript could be a similar kind of case.

Don't take this too seriously. It's a self selected group of people. Most professional developers didn't take the survey and it's didn't corrected for any variables.

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."

It could also be that more experienced developers don’t have time to take surveys.

there's a lot of students.

Students and younger devs need to ask more questions, so they have a more active presence. While an older dev may still need to ask questions, they can just google, and find the answer without needing to create an account.

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

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

I have 3-4 public github repos ( <20 stars ) and I sometimes participate in definitely typed typescript moderation. I remember that I checked “participate in open source” on that question

It's not half of developers, it's half of developers that answered their survey.

I'd be willing to bet that people that answer surveys about this are generally more involved in other areas online like OSS.

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

I guess many misunderstood the question and answered macOS because they use a Mac for development.

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

Maybe because the docs are good enough and easy to understand. I can't remember if I ever looked up things on SO for Vue.

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)

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.

Cordova is highly popular, and is used by web developers with limited native development background. Given that Cordova manages native projects, which is complicated and ever changing, it proves to be a complicated effort. Additionally, it has a large community of volunteers building plugins, but with inconsistent maintenance like any OSS volunteer effort.

You're starting to see the same thing with other cross platform tools like React Native with managing upgrades and out of date plugins that rely on now-deprecated APIs. It's a hard problem if you're not willing to go in and learn how to manage each platform. Cordova is a victim of its own success when it comes to these surveys.

Yep! Facebook and Docker among them.

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

:)

Who wants to learn Go apart from the people posting in Go threads here on HN? I have yet to meet anyone who is not in this micro-cosmos who's even heard of it.

Hype feeding hype?

On a side note, I've been using it at work and I'm actually quite liking it myself

Maybe because it is a Google language, if it was done at company XYZ no one would care.

Also because anyone jumping into the Docker/Kubernetes train eventually has to deal with Go.

I started with Go out of shear curiosity a few years ago. Built a few web backends with it, and a number of simple utility tools with it. I know this is a bit of a broken record line, but it's standard library and simplicity have made it something I naturally gravitate towards. Especially when I need to do something quick.

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.

I assume that F# developers bring better business outcomes.

I am both a C# and F# developer, and in my experience functional code (F#, OCaml etc) tends to be 5 times less buggy than an imperative equivalent. F# compiler does an impressive job of catching errors at compile time: this is the primary reason for better outcomes. The second significant contributing factor: functional code tends to have less side effects, and thus developers can reason about such code more realistically.

A third contributing factor is lazy computations. Which leads to (surprise, surprise) better overall performance at runtime.

Less bugs + Better performance = Higher salary

Though I don't say F# is perfect. It has its quirks and there is a lot of room for future improvements.

There aren't that many of them. Companies using F# pay a premium.

I believe it has seen some significant adoption in finance.

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?

International responses skew the salary data and make it useless.

Least paid developer type is game development. And c++ is commonly used there.

C/C++ are basically languages used only for technical products, while Java/web is used internally by pretty much every large company on Earth. This puts immense pressure on salaries.

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.

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.

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

Yeah, they did not even considered native development.

What were you expecting?

A non-binary coder? How does that even work? :P

I was confused about this one - Transgender isn't a gender, it's a change of gender. Why would it be a selection? Wouldn't a trans person identify with M or F?

> 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?

Well if the numbers of various minorities are significantly lower in our industry than the overall average, then perhaps it indicates a hostile environment that we can work on.

Thank you for pointing this out. I don't see the relevance myself.

And why group "white" and European descent together? Too much diversity that doesn't actually count as diversity?

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.

India is not in the Middle East.

Not really replying to the point you're trying to make but I don't think "middle eastern" is a race nor ethnicity...

Middle East does not include India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East

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'

>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?

How have you had an impact? I'm curious because when I looked, the impact I could have through my job (at the cost of 2,000 hours a year) seemed quite small, and the impact of donating high. I'm aware the topic has been covered in great detail, eg by the organization 80,000 hours.

You are happy doing something because of its impact, but to expect everybody else to seems very presumptive.

Edit: just noticed who you are ha ha