In December 2011, we launched the 3rd ever Stack Overflow Annual User Survey to measure changes in user demographics and trends from last year. First, a big thank you to everyone who participated, and now on to the results!
View the survey results
Demographics Let’s start off with some basic demographics: the majority (50.3%) of users are between ages 25-34 and very experienced (64.3% of users have 6+ years of programming experience). So, where do all of these developers work? The percentage of developers working at a start-up remained strong with 30.7% of respondents. We then took a look at salary by company size, and, not surprisingly, users who work at larger companies tend to make more money.
Knowledge The top 5 languages users reported knowing were: SQL, JavaScript, CSS, C#, Java. Coincidentally, the most common projects were "Web Platform" at 37.1%, followed by "Enterprise" at 24.4%. We dug a little deeper to see if language knowledge impacted salary, and it certainly does. There is a strong correlation between number of languages known and a higher salary.
Mobile On the mobile front, smart phone usage showed a dramatic increase. In particular, Android usage actually surpassed iPhone usage with 48.0% of respondents saying they own an Android phone as compared to 34.1% who own an iPhone. Last year, the iPhone was the most popular device (34.3%) and Android trailed in second place (30.4%). RIM’s Blackberry continued to fall out of favor with only 6% of respondents owning one. Reputation Last year, many of you asked to segment the data by reputation, so here goes. First we segmented all of the respondents into three reputation groups and then we cross tabulated the results to see if there were any differences in these groups. You can draw your own conclusions from the table below, but higher rep users tend to be older and more likely to be happy in their jobs than those with little or no rep (however we can’t quite go so far as to say that the WAY to be happier in your job is to spend more time earning rep on Stack Overflow).
If you’d like to receive the entire data set, download them from here. If you're looking to put your SQL, Javascript or other language skills to work, check out Stack Overflow Jobs.