Take the 2018 Developer Survey
It’s that time of year again—the annual developer survey is now open! This survey marks the 8th year we’ve been asking the developer community for their thoughts on everything from programming languages to career preferences. This year, we added in new questions about artificial intelligence, ethics in coding, and more.
As in previous years, anonymized results of the survey will be made publicly available under the Open Database License. We encourage you to download and analyze the dataset yourself when it becomes available. Throughout the survey, certain answers you give will be treated as personally identifiable information, and therefore kept out of the anonymized results file. We’ll call out each of those in the survey with a note saying “This information will be kept private.”
We’ve made this year’s survey short (and by short we mean somewhat-freaking-long), but we’ve done our absolute best to be respectful of the time you’re giving by taking the survey. If you have any questions or feedback in general, we’d love to hear it.
The survey will be open for three weeks starting today, and will tentatively close on January 26th. Users who complete the survey will be awarded the Census badge across any SE communities they belong to.
37 Comments
Thanks for sharing Rachel!
Cannot find ‘Taiwan’ in the country list…
The same as you cannot find ‘Boston’ in the country list 😉
do not be an asshole Boston is a city
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQTtwh2GRME
This survey takes FOREVER! I quit after 15 min of writing.
Meh…too long too much personal questions…closed it!
Gross salary question: per month? year? Unclear
The survey has a few problems:
The gross salary question is unclear if you should answer weelky, monthly or yearly.
The questions that you range from 1 to 5, has 1 to the left and 5 to the right, i.e. increasing order. Later on the survey you have some agree-disagree questions that has agree to the left and disagree to the right, I almost submitted that page with answers opposed to what I really meant.
Finally, in my country some benefit packages are required by law, like transportation and food allowance, so I don’t know how to rate how important they are in relation to other benefits. I also believe “retirement employer matching” does not exist here, also making it hard to rate in relation with other benefits.
The ordering questions are frustrating to me. Bottom of the list of priorities is very different from a flat out “N/A”
Ghostery blocks the initial redirect, and after reluctantly allowing it, the entire thing won’t load. Pass.
Have completed each and every task but got stuck in one problem please help me with the code
I’d like to hear SO’s rationale behind removing the “Oracle Database” option for the database question. It’s still the top-ranked database in the world, even if it’s not the top database with questions on SO.
I completely agree with you.
Why is there no my country (Taiwan) on dropdown list?
When I’ve found that a question of type “strongly disagree . . . strongly agree” the “disagree” was on the right, not left, I tried to go back and check if I filled it correctly at the first time but going that much questions back appeared to be impossible in this survey platform.
Have just got to the “Imagine that you are assessing a potential job opportunity” and “Now, imagine you are assessing a job’s benefits package” questions and have had to stop as I cannot meaningfully rank 10 or 11 items in order, and there is no option to “skip” the question. The old format, where you selected (and possibly ranked) as many as were meaningful was far better.
Not to mention that the benefits package one seemed very US oriented. I’ve never heard of any company except possibly Google offering some of those benefits in any of the countries I’ve worked in.
Yeah, rankings are difficult for more than a few options, and don’t provide meaningful information. Ratings are much better, which is why most surveys use Likert scales instead. Not sure what SO was thinking.
After 15 minutes I completed half the survey. That is way too long. Then I quit.
The question on which tools I use for team communication lacked two very important technologies: telephone and e-mail.
The survey was PRETTY personal and long.
I regretted inputting my mental issues.. Regrets were made…
Well, that is submitted now…
Mobile site: Some of the circles to click on are one or maybe a few pixels wider than high. What a weird bug, how does that happen?
How do you “identify” as having autism or European heritage? It’s not a choice. You could just as well ask if I “feel like having 2-4 kids”. It’s probably not what you want to know.
The 30 minutes are pretty optimistic. After getting a timeout (because I answered a few questions here and there while doing other things), I resubmitted my answers. Every page took a few seconds to load and that way I already needed 30 minutes in the second run. Btw: Longer timeout, please!
Feature suggestion: You could first show an optional login screen and if I log in, my answers are saved. When I then log in again next year, it preselects a few answers. For example, if I answer in 2019 that I know Java and SQL and I’m a programmer for 7 years and then I log in to the 2021 survey, it could preselect Java and SQL and being a programmer for 9 years. Of course I can still change it, but that would speed up answers where I have to remember and judge things thoroughly that rarely change.
There was no opportunity to answer “Why” alongside the answers about usage of SO Jobs. I’ve viewed the site but I don’t have a developer story because the site only seems to be useful to people living in a handful of places.
Feature suggestion: I’ve taken the survey a few years now, but it’s just SOOO long I couldn’t get through it this year. But, I’d still like to participate. Have you thought of having a “short form” and “extended form?” Put the top 10-15 questions first. Then, if I want to continue I can choose to, or I can choose to just stop and submit what I have.
Just a small observation, you ask 2 questions about our development environments. One regarding the primary operating system and another regarding the number of monitors. It might be interesting to ask though how many workstations do we use and what operating system they are running on. You might be surprised by the answers.
A couple of observations:
– It is long
– The part about marketing and advertisement annoyed me. It looked more like a marketing survey for you than question about developers.
– Will the results be published?
Results are published every year. You should see results in March. You can see previous results here: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/
Come on, you should be able to spell WordPress properly
It’s way too long, didn’t finish it…
Less a “developer survey” and more a “gigantic data mining for careers”. Agree with the previous commenters about the ordering questions – drag and drop was actually a pain in the ass to use, and no option to say “I don’t care about X”. Or even NEGATIVELY rate something (share offers are a red flag to me)
Too long, I skipped some questions. Also, it uses the politically-correct definition of “gender”. To which, of course, “Attack Helicopter” is the only reasonable answer.
The questions don’t have numbers, which is bad.
At question X, the following error message was displayed after I klicked on “Next”:
Sorry, an unexpected error occurred. #B.2zgmklw.jclwvpse
If it doesn’t go away I’m not going to repeat the survey, which is bad, too.
The problem went away so I finished the survey.
Hate that gender question… male, female and other should be there.
I really really hate fanatic political correctness.
Sad that survey was open for only 3 weeks (2 weekends). I noticed it during a week and wanted to fill it in today but seems it’s too late..