We’re back for another edition of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the largest and most comprehensive survey of software developers on earth. Every year, we include questions about your favorite technologies, coding habits, and work preferences, as well as how you learn, share, and level up as a developer. Want to see how you stack up against the world’s developers? Take the survey now. We’ll publish initial results for you to peruse in March. A few weeks after that, you’ll be able to download and analyze anonymized results of the survey under the Open Database License (ODbL). We look forward to seeing what you find!
Why We Do This
We estimate that responses to the 2016 survey cost 14.6 years of total developer time. That’s a lot of missed opportunities to squash bugs and ship product. So why do we do this? And more importantly, how do we pay developers back for their time spent? It starts with our shared, company-wide mission: Everything we do at Stack Overflow is done to make developers’ lives better. Whether it’s through Q&A, Documentation, or finding developers better jobs, we’re single-mindedly focused on doing what’s best for the developer community, and how we can promote developers’ interests. The first step to doing this well requires knowing in detail what different developers want, what their pain points are, and how they want to share and improve their skills. Developers are generally misunderstood by non-technical managers, recruiters, and policy makers. This has led to lousy hiring practices, poor environments for development (open office concept, anyone?), and misallocation of resources. Having reliable, comprehensive survey results we can point to helps us educate companies. It also empowers developers who need more data to support their cause, whether it’s in asking for a raise to match industry standards, or because they’re pushing for a change with internal development or HR practices. We also of course use the survey to improve our own policies at Stack Overflow, as well as our products for developers. We want to know if what we’re doing is working, and what you want to see improved.
See How You Stack Up
Last year, we fielded responses from over 50,000 developers in 173 countries. We’re looking to break our record again this year, and we need your help. Take the survey now. Got questions of your own or feedback? Post in the comments below or on Meta.