Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey | Hacker News Reader

Results of Joel Spolsky's "What Programmers Want" Survey

blog.stackoverflow.com

114 pointsbrianwillis50 comments

One thing that programmers like are decently formatted reports that present the information in a meaningful and elegant manner.

Sadly this is none of those things.

What, you don't love charts and graphs fresh from Excel 95? With text so crisp, it could have gone through a brand new fax machine?

Edit: Apologies, that wasn't meant to be so snarky.

It's somewhat unfortunate that there's no breakdown between the different levels of experience.

That is to say, those with 12+ years of experience probably have very different views of what is important to them in a workplace than those with 1-2 years of experience. The data for the survey should allow us see this breakdown, right?

I would not make that assumption.

I held a survey for the Austin design community last year, and the things people with 10+ years of experience wanted to learn and felt were missing in the workplaces was not statistically significantly different from everyone else.

Surprised us.

Pie charts for comparison?! Here, I made you some bar charts instead: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Country

Thanks to gavinballard for the CSV link.

If you want to see different breakdowns, just download the workbook/software and play with it yourself.

http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/wpw/Experience

Where do developers disappear after 8 years? And then pop back up after 12.

management?

I think the right question is: what happened 12 years ago?

The answer could be that the bubble burst.

I think there is a natural tail-off, but the 12+ year category rolls up this long tail into a substantial total.

kids?

"12+" is a wider bucket than "9 to 11".

The half-life of a software engineer is about 5-6 years. To understand this, keep in mind that most of "software" isn't working on cutting-edge problems using high-productivity languages. It's Java/C++ legacy maintenance and crufty business logic. A substantial fraction of law and business school students are programmers who landed in enterprise Java jobs and bored out after a few years.

Actually that made me think about what pie charts are actually useful for.

I think they are useful when the decreased value of other metrics than our target metric is more appealing than the increased value of our target metric itself.Example: share of profit.

I think the most interesting question is not what the "average" programmer (this study is likely skewed) whats, but what they're willing to do to get it. That 93% would take a significant cut to work somewhere is better is staggering to me (although I'd do the same). Money certainly does not buy happiness.

I'm not surprised by taking a 10% paycut for a better fitting role. I was surprised that having equity or options in the company was one of the least important "wants".

That's because options are worth less than the paper they are written on, in the end.

I took the survey and rated equity/options pretty low. My rationale (which may very well be wrong):

1) Options offerings are typically a fraction of 1%: even for the first engineer at companies with no technical co-founders. This (I think) is a carry-over from the dot-com era where IPO exits came hot and heavy. These days, if you're lucky, you're looking at a low-7 to mid-8 figure exit. And to become fully vested, you're going to have to stick around for 3-4 years.

2) Even with a big successful exit, you never know if the company will pull a Skype/Zynga on you.

With that said, I wouldn't scoff at them, I just won't be weighting them heavily in compensation talks.

Yeah I agree. I would not sacrifice (much) salary for equity, but would certainly negotiate to have as much equity as I could. Regardless of how it all shakes out, I would like to think that I am somewhat vested in the eventual outcome of the company.

Well even big companies with bog standard share save schemes can be very lucative one of BT's 5 year scheams if maxed out would have netted you $70k (efectivly tax free) and that is the scheme open to every one.

Plus we use to get $400 or so of shares per year as profit share

I don't think anyone solid would take a sub-1% slice as Engineer #1. A pre-funding, pre-code startup is worth $4 million, tops (and that's generous). Vested over four years, that's not nearly enough to compensate for the lower compensation and higher risk of a business at that point.

I worked at a major tech company, which gave pretty good stock options. The problem was, they then counted their value toward your salary if it went up while determining raises.

Stock goes up, no raises this year - look at how much you made! Stock goes down - standard raise this year! (And presumably, stock falls off a cliff, layoffs). Because the company was doing well, new hires out of college were making more base salary than people who had been there for several years and performing well. So it's just unstable income, effectively.

The lack of interest in "Stock Options/Profit Sharing Program" should be a sobering reality for business people looking for technical co-founders/employees.

I wonder...is it a complete lack of interest, or is it, "I'm not interested in the tiny amount of equity/sharing I typically get offered?"

The latter leads to the former.

Everyone starts out young and enthusiastic and thinking that they can build something cool that will make everyone rich. Young, clever guys do what they think is the hard work: designing and building a cool product. They think that they are sharing their talent with some lucky money guys and everyone will benefit. Sadly, they learn that they were giving their talent to the money guys and the money guys got rich.

I've been bitten four times now. I've never seen a penny from an option. Every time I've wanted to buy some, the rules have changed and I have to wait another year and then realise that my options have been diluted again without my say-so.

So at first I assumed that my options would make me rich. Now I assume that my options are just an unobtainable carrot dangled in front of me.

Do you ever ask for salary/bonuses/other "real value" up front instead of options, and if so, does it get you anywhere?

When I answered the question, I meant it in a sense of "I don't expect to get rich if we ever IPO or get bought, and as an employee I haven't any way to prevent dilution or otherwise try to maximize the value of these options. So how about we take another look at our base, hm?"

Yes that surrised me as well - would be inetersting to see it broken down by country

I would have answered this question very differently 10 years ago. Since then I have seen every option I have ever own disappear through dilation, redundancy or through the company going down.

Sadly, options are generally worthless and shares are only worth something in a profitable company on the rise (and if you can actually sell them).

Bonuses are better for people with houses, cars & children. But again only if they are paid as promised. So often I have met targets and seen no bonus: bonuses are on the whim (and often performance) of others.

I found the "would you take a 10% paycut" matched my experience precisely. Back when I worked at Microsoft on developer tools, I would sometimes get contacted by people who were in the finance industry with salaries 2-4x what we could offer, and often transitioning from some nice CTO/Chief Head Architect title to Software Design Engineer.

But, universally, they were _excited_ for the opportunity to work on real compilers, tools, etc. and especially to be surrounded by people they could learn from. I'm would expect the lurking Google hiring managers have experienced the same thing.

This would be a lot better without pie charts.

I was thinking the same thing. Maybe someone will plug the numbers into bar charts so we can read the damn thing.

If an employer were to take anything away from this survey, I'd say it should be the last question. Way too often have I been interviewed by monotonous and unorganized people who misrepresent an otherwise great position.

Please. When performing interviews, try and get people who both like what they're doing and are organized.

On the flipside - interviewers at my previous company were excited and interesting, but misrepresented a monotonous and unorganized [sic] position.

The raw data is available here: http://s.tk/wpwraw

I suspect many managers, if they ever see this report, would only take-away: programmers don't care about money and stock options.

I know some of my past managers would (and they would use it as an excuse to justify not upgrading dev machines so often). Unsurprisingly none of them would ever read it as it isn't in the form of a management guru book.

After reading about Joel Spolsky "What Programmers Want" survey, I thought it'd be interesting to know how programmers feel about their current employer.

Fill up the 3 questions survey, it really takes 3 minues https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEx6LUN...

Thank you already for taking the time, we'll publish the result on matchFWD blog at http://blog.matchfwd.com as soon as we have significant data.

I wish that benefits and perhaps vacation related questions were on here. Next time I look for a job, a sane amount of vacation is something I am going to demand, and I think I would sacrifice significant salary to get it.

I'm shocked at how many people are in start ups - does that perhaps reflect the fact that if your a start up you're typically building your own tools from scratch in areas you're less familiar with, so perhaps need access to experts you don't have locally (i.e. in your company)?

The breakdown for start up/small business isn't great. We have less than 25 people but the company has been around for 17 years.

yeah agreed - the company where I work is 20+ years old, has about 15 ppl but is definitely not a start up.

Agreed - both companies I've worked for have been around for 7-8 years and only have about 10-15 people.

Remember also that the respondant pool is biased.

"Good management" wasn't on the list?

Easy browser viewing https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://blog.stackoverflow....

HN automatically adds a Scribd link to any PDF submission. Why not just use that?

I hate being in the "other" slice. Look at it.

I like pie-charts, but I wish that those who did not respond were shown as a missing slice.

I noticed 49 people currently work for a company whose size is 'other'. What's this about?

Perhaps, they are currently between jobs or unemployed.

Wait, where's "food"?

Interesting there is no mention of Pensions

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