2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

Can someone help this old (2^5 years) developer out? I&#x27;ve worked with a number of programming languages over the years, and have never found a combination that brings me such joy and productivity as Ruby and Rails. However, I&#x27;ve always felt that Python and Ruby were very similar in style &amp; goal.<p>Can someone who is experienced in both Rails &amp; Django explain why Python &amp; Django are trending up so quickly, while Ruby &amp; Rails are ranking on the &quot;most dreaded&quot; lists? I don&#x27;t want this to become a holy war, I am just genuinely curious what I&#x27;m overlooking.

&gt; &quot;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.&quot;<p>Not at all. It&#x27;s a self selecting survey, the people who choose to answer are likely more confident in their abilities than those that don&#x27;t, and, contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average.<p>Average != median

&gt; Do Developers Need to Become Managers to Make More Money?<p>50% said no. I think this is naive. We&#x27;ve had this discussion on HN before. Companies pay lip service to the idea that they have parallel tracks for management and engineering, but the reality of it is that it takes far more success to move up the engineering ladder.<p>You can be one of the very best engineers in your company, or one of many hundreds of senior managers, and make the same money. If you look at how many people are at each salary level, the higher you go, the worse the ratio gets of management to engineer.<p>If you want to get to the highest levels of the engineering ladder, you have to be one of the most well known engineers in the world. Or be a VP. It&#x27;s not easy to be a VP, but there are far more VPs out there than Distinguished Engineers.

&gt; 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.<p>I&#x27;m torn here. It&#x27;s hard to correct for bias. It would be like if a bank had a survey and had people rate their financial stability - but they had to have an account with the bank to participate in the survey. Wouldn&#x27;t that bias the results in favor of financially responsible people?<p>I&#x27;d be interested how many 0 rep new accounts with lots of downvotes claimed high competence vs. established accounts. It could very well be that people with SO accounts who are willing to take the time for SO&#x27;s survey are the type of people that are more competent on average than developers that don&#x27;t have SO accounts and don&#x27;t participate in surveys.

I&#x27;m a non-binary manager who was formerly a non-binary engineer. I use singular they.<p>I&#x27;ve had people go out of their way to make my professional life more challenging or insulting. But it makes me happy to see nonbinary&#x2F;nonconforming identities addressed in this survey. Our experience of the tech world is very different, and it&#x27;s great to see some acknowledgment of that.

As with every year, take these result with a massive pinch of salt. The results are heavily weighted by students and young developers who are way more likely to chase the latest trends and buzzwords

Kudos to the Visual Studio Code team for all its success.<p>VS Code and TypeScript, are kinds of technologies and tools that just win entirely on their strong merit, in spite the image of who has created them.<p>.NET Core is getting up there too. MS has always been a developer friendly company but they are definitely earning mindshare back from non .NET developers.

Curious about the salaries for the top four paying technology languages. Three of the four for US are functional focused languages, and for global all four are functional focused.<p>As someone learning Scala, this is both encouraging and interesting, and I&#x27;m curious as to any explanation to the table result. Do functional programming languages increase developer productivity so significantly that a single developer can command such compensation? Do these languages attract highly productive developers whom the market compensates for their productivity? Something else?

As a solo indie developer running my own saas business for 20+ years now, and rarely interacting with other devs, this survey is priceless. I often wonder where I and my stack&#x2F;tools are in relation to the rest of the field. This report (even if it is biased or skewed) makes me feel like I&#x27;m not alone and gives me some validation on my life path and technology choices.

I think the most interesting portion was the &quot;Developer&#x27;s perspectives by gender&quot;.<p>When asked what one thing they would change about Stack Overflow:<p>Women used the following words more often (compared to men): condescending, replies, nicer, rude, dumb, friendlier, assholes, thanks, confusing, knowing.<p>While men used the following words: simpler, huge, banned, angular, official, complex, algorithm, expert, bounty, force.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;survey&#x2F;2019?utm_source=so-owned&amp;utm_medium=blog&amp;utm_campaign=dev-survey-2019&amp;utm_content=launch-blog#community-_-developers-perspectives-by-gender" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.stackoverflow.com&#x2F;survey&#x2F;2019?utm_source=so...</a>

Can someone explain why rust is so beloved?<p>Also I work in R primarily, I find it funny that love and dread are both near 50%.

Bittersweet to see how much “distracting work environment” is reported to reduce productivity, given that companies abjectly refuse to provide private &amp; quiet workspaces despite it being unequivocally cost effective to do so even for most start-ups in dense urban centers.<p>I continue to find the discussion of salary disappointing though. The survey provides a good opportunity for more detailed information.

I actually found this to be the most interesting excerpt from the survey results<p>&gt;In the United States, almost 30% of respondents said they deal with a mental health challenge, a higher proportion than other large countries such as the UK, Canada, Germany, or India.<p>I would be interested to know just how much a higher proportion it was than other countries.

Odd that Perl isn&#x27;t mentioned anywhere, good or bad, in these results. It&#x27;s usually at least in there among the Most Dreaded. Was it not listed as an option this year?

Clojure did it again. Most paid language.

VSCode has seriously dominated these lists since its release in 2016.<p>Overall:<p>2016: 7.2%<p>2017: N&#x2F;A<p>2018: 34.9%<p>2019: 50.7%<p>Web: 2016: Unranked<p>2017: 24.0%<p>2018: 38.7%<p>2019: 55.6%<p>Mobile:<p>2017: N&#x2F;A<p>2018: 36.6%<p>2019: 53.8%<p>Sysadmin&#x2F;Devops:<p>2017: 22.4%<p>2018: 36.5%<p>2019: 55.2%<p>Of particular note, in 2019, VSCode is actually <i>more</i> popular than Vim among sysadmin&#x2F;devops, and is a mere 0.4% less popular than Android Studio among mobile developers.<p>It seems like it&#x27;s mostly been gobbling market from its competitors: Sublime Text (peak of 31.0% in 2016 down to 23.4% in 2019) and Atom (peak of 20.0% in Web in 2017 down to 12.7% in 2019), although its possible their decline is circumstantial.

So Scala is among most dreaded right below Java at 41.7%. Considering in popularity it&#x27;s quite low at 3.8%, it seem surprising to me.

When we say percentage - the numbers are not adding up to 100. How are we supposed to read this report?

Gone are the days when developers defined their job as &#x27;X-programmer&#x27;(X being the language) or at-least in India as platform e.g Java platform.<p>Companies have realised that programming languages are like &#x27;drill bit in a tool box&#x27;, one needs to use the best bit for the job.

Regarding the most dreaded languages, 3 (C, Objective-C, Assembly) of the top 4 probably my favorites actually. I find working with and developing in C (Objective-C in iOS&#x2F;macOS) and doing assembly the most fun I have had and look forward to. Maybe it&#x27;s because right now I only do it for hobby.<p>What makes it the most dreaded? My only guess is having to maintain legacy code that&#x27;s hard to understand or poorly written or another valid reason. I&#x27;d love to get into an embedded C &#x2F; assembly role. I got pulled into web development early on, but I had a friend who was stubborn and held out and ended up coding games for casinos in C&#x2F;C++ in Linux and SDL. I&#x27;m so jealous.

Top highlights:<p><i>&gt; 11% of our respondents said they didn&#x27;t want to communicate with their fellow human beings via either method</i> [face-to-face conversations or online chat]<p>and<p><i>&gt; The aspects of Stack Overflow that respondents would like to change exhibit differences across demographic groups. For example, developers who are men are more likely to want change in official site rules (from the algorithms behind them to how they are enforced), while developers who are women are more likely to want to change norms for communication on our site.</i><p>The top words used by women to describe SO&#x27;s problems include &quot;condescending&quot;, &quot;rude&quot;, &quot;assholes&quot;.

Is anyone surprised seeing Bash&#x2F;shell scripting being so popular? In my experience, I have seen very few people taking Bash scripting seriously. And it is frowned upon in tech interviews.

Interesting that WordPress is the most dreaded tech every single year for the last 3+ years, yet WP &quot;market share&quot; is increasing every single year (it&#x27;s now powering 1&#x2F;3 of the web). Is it a disconnect between developers and non-developers? Is it just that developers don&#x27;t like to work on &quot;boring&quot; tech, and working on WP is not a super-great resume builder? Curious to hear what people think.

Where is Salesforce? It was consistently ranking high on &quot;Dreaded&quot; platforms but seems to be gone altogether this year.

That&#x27;s really interesting to see more Latinx developers (7.3%) than East Asian developers (5.3%) as a proportion of all professional developers. It&#x27;s an awesome surprise, but is there a measurement reason for this? Unfortunately, this doesn&#x27;t match my experience working in tech in the Bay.

Just curious, for the salary section, could someone explain why the salary for frontend role is lower the full stack role which is then lower than the backend role?<p>I personally really like doing front end (Vue&#x2F;React etc) work but when I saw this salary gap, I feel like that I need to reconsider my career path.

Can anyone enlighten me as to why Heroku is the number 3 most dreaded platform (behind Wordpress and IBM Cloud&#x2F;Watson)?<p>From my hobbyist exposure it&#x27;s pretty awesome. I understand it&#x27;s expensive for production... but why do people dread working on it?

Wow, jQuery is still one of the most popular web frameworks. That was unexpected...

See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19614674" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19614674</a> for more discussion

1. I don&#x27;t quite understand why people <i>love</i> Rust. I have nothing against it but I just don&#x27;t quite <i>get</i> why the <i>love</i>. I viewed it as Modern C++ with Memory Management done right from Engineering perspective and elegant syntax with package management done right from the beginning. And may be just my circle or reading list, many Rubyist jumped to Rust, and more often after trying a few times and clicked, they felt in <i>love</i> with it.<p>2. Ruby = Rails. ~8.5% of Ruby Developers and there are 8.2% of Rails Developers.<p>3. Ruby &#x2F; Rails are for many years split in love and dreaded languages and framework. ~50% on both side. I don&#x27;t see any other languages and framework has similar pattern.<p>4. There are more Django &#x2F; Laravel developers than Ruby Rails.<p>5. ~60% of Developers are on Windows. That was obvious right? And yet Ruby &#x2F; Rails Community has ignore the Windows as a development platform for years. [1] My guess it is the lack of resources.<p>6. Speaking of Resources, Ruby is the top programming language that is surviving without a Major Cooperation ( Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple ) backing.<p>7. Ruby &#x27;s Median salary, comparatively speaking is trending on the higher side. And also one of the highest with respective of lower years of experience. That is both good and bad. Developers get higher salary, but less company are willing to choose it for cost reason.<p>8. Am I correct to assume those Salaries exclude any Stock grant? Which is common in US?<p>9. Visual Studio Code really is taking over, and there are more performance improvement coming. [2] I wonder if they would consider moving to WASM in the future.<p>10. Financial and banking - 8.9%, are the third in respondent&#x27;s industry. I am a little surprise how many people are working in that field.<p>11. 60% of them prefer to work in office . THAT is great to hear. Not every one likes working from home or Remote. May be those who prefer to work from home are just very vocal about it.<p>12. And it is for that reason 80% of them prefer to have a Face to Face conversation. As easy as it is to type, write, calling or even Video conference, I still believe there is something when two people sit together and communicate. There is something that goes far beyond words coming out.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samsaffron.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;why-i-stuck-with-windows-for-6-years-while-developing-discourse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samsaffron.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2019&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;why-i-stuck-with-w...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kaimaetzel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1114908539342864384?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kaimaetzel&#x2F;status&#x2F;1114908539342864384?s=...</a>

<i>&quot;Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem.&quot;</i><p>Interesting. Isn&#x27;t the former a subset of the latter?