The 2018 Developer Survey Results are Live
Each year, we ask the developer community about everything from their favorite technologies to their job preferences. This year marks the eighth year we’ve published our Annual Developer Survey results—with the largest number of respondents yet. Over 100,000 developers took the 30-minute survey this past January. This year, we covered a few new topics ranging…
Rachel Ferrigno
Marketing (Former)
Each year, we ask the developer community about everything from their favorite technologies to their job preferences. This year marks the eighth year we’ve published our Annual Developer Survey results—with the largest number of respondents yet. Over 100,000 developers took the 30-minute survey this past January. This year, we covered a few new topics ranging from artificial intelligence to ethics in coding.
Top Takeaways
- DevOps and machine learning are important trends in the software industry today. Languages and frameworks associated with these kinds of works are on the rise, and developers working in these areas command the highest salaries.
- Only tiny fractions of developers say that they would write unethical code or that they have no obligation to consider the ethical implications of code, but beyond that, respondents see a lot of ethical gray. Developers are not sure how they would report ethical problems, and have differing ideas about who ultimately is responsible for unethical code.
- Developers are overall optimistic about the possibilities that artificial intelligence offers, but are not in agreement about what the dangers of AI are.
- Python has risen in the ranks of programming languages on our survey, surpassing C# in popularity this year, much like it surpassed PHP last year.
- When assessing a prospective job, different kinds of developers apply different sets of priorities. Women say their highest priorities are company culture and opportunities for professional development, while men say their highest priorities are compensation and working with specific technologies.
We’ll make the anonymized results of the survey available for download under the Open Database License (ODbL) on May 30th. In the meantime, you can see the full data sets from previous years here.
Have questions or feedback? Head on over to Meta and use the [survey-2018] tag.
11 Comments
It’s just me or the the “Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted Frameworks, Libraries, and Tools” is highly manipulated?
So what do you do, show only 12 options to choose from on the survey. How is this possible that the 12 are the same on all the categories?
And last year there were 9, same problem. Dreaded and Loved are just inverted. In 2015 and 2016 they were all different, so I assume those years there were more options to choose.
Similar things happen on the other “Loved/Dreaded” categories.
There are has summary about Educational Attainment, but really useful knowledge about that will be equality between Educational Attainment and Years Coding Professionally, for example.
I have the very same impression.
Frameworks, Libraries and Tools lacks relevant technologies and seems too far from what we can see on any other survey.
Are there enough respondents in the student and non-professional developer brackets to break their results out from the general population? With the differences between pro devs and the overall survey results almost identical the whole way down just doing that breakout seems rather pointless (presumably because the vast majority of respondents were pros).
I’d be interested in seeing if people who don’t get paid to program as their principle employment have significantly different interests than those of us who do.
I don’t see Bangkok, Thailand marked on the map for a response. Did you have to have a certain number of respondents to mark a location? I do see the Isaan area Thailand marked. I wouldn’t think there are not that many developers in Isaan compared to Bangkok.
Why the heck was “sexual orientation” asked ?! Is this something common to ask in the US ?
I was quite interested in the data presented. I do however, have a comment on an area for improvement.
You break down the responses, where appropriate, into 2 groups:
1. All 2. Developers
On the surface, this is fine. However, since the vast majority of the responders are Developers, both graphs look almost the same. To really see a difference, you can’t put the largest piece on both sides.
I would encourage you to Investigate
1. != Developers 2. == Developers
We may be able to learn from the difference, but only if we can SEE it
(Asked in Meta. Head over there if you wish to reply)
Hi Rachel,
I appreciate the detail in this article. Well written and too the point!
Thanks!
The survey is interesting, but hardly “comprehensive” (though I doubt any survey could be). There are over 20 million programmers world-wide, so 100,000 is only about .5% max. I didn’t complete, nor did any programmer I know (granted, that is only a few dozen). And it is likely overly USA oriented/focused. But it is . . . Interesting. 🙂
Kinda curious why Rails was left out of all of the framework questions. I was interested to see how it was trending.
Thanks for telling your story, Rick.