Here at Stack Overflow, everything we build is done with the same single-minded, compulsive, fanatical obsession to serve programmers. We’re a community built by developers for developers, and each month, we serve 40 million coders looking for answers to their most pressing questions. Because of this, we like to think we know software developers better than anyone — and we have the data to back up that claim. Each year since 2010, we’ve asked developers what they’re up to, what tech they care about most, and what they want. With more than 50,000 responses fielded from 173 countries, this year’s Stack Overflow Developer Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of the programmer workforce that has ever been conducted. View the full results here.Key Findings on Technology:
- JavaScript remains the most popular programming language in the world.
- React is the fastest growing technology on Stack Overflow. Swift is exploding too, and Objective-C is in decline.
- Rust is the most-loved programming language. A higher percentage of developers who program with it want to continue to do so more than any other programming language.
- Visual Basic is the most dreaded language. A higher percentage of devs who program with it don’t want to continue with it more than any other programming language.
Key Findings about Developers at Work:
- 91% of developers in the workforce are "gainfully employed" either full-time, self-employed, or freelance.
- 46% of developers don’t have a bachelor’s in computer science or a related field. So if you’re an employer requiring one of these degrees in order to consider a developer candidate, you may want to reconsider your strategy.
- Developers just want to code. Job satisfaction is highly correlated with pushing code to production. And 57% of developers told us they check-in or commit code multiple times per day.
- Make it rain! Cloud technologies like Spark and Cassandra pay better than anything else. The median salary for developers in the US who know Spark is $125k, and there are plenty of cloud devs who are making a lot more than that. (And remember, you can find jobs in Spark on Stack Overflow Jobs!)
- Don’t call programmers “rockstars” or “ninjas”. Only about 10% of devs call themselves ninjas, and 7% consider themselves rockstars.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our survey and shared information about yourself. We’ll be releasing the full data set in just a few weeks. Do you have ideas for what we should ask about next year? Tell us in the comments. Oh, and one more thing. Here’s the answer to how many pennies were in that piggy bank.