It’s that time of year again—we’re launching our 2020 Developer Survey. We can’t believe that it’s been that long from our first one, where we saw Android developers overtake iOS devs in the battle for mobile supremacy. That survey only had 2,500 respondents. We’ve been able to reach more developers every year. While we'd love that number to continue to grow, we want that to happen while collecting insights from a representative sample of everyone.
That’s right, we want our survey to represent everyone who codes. The more data points that we can gather on what life is like for developers around the world, the more useful the results will be to you and the tech ecosystem at large. While we have included a few questions about Stack Overflow itself, the majority of the survey covers general programming topics, like the languages people love and hate. This is larger than us; it’s about the programming community as a whole, whether they’re active participants on our network or not.
For this survey to work, we need your help. If you’re reading this, you’re probably an engaged Stack Overflow user. We’ve been testing with some beta users, and found that it takes about 20 minutes to complete the survey. That's right, in the time it takes to watch a single episode of Friends, you get to make your voice heard in the data that will define this moment in coding. The survey will be open and accepting your answers until February 25.
In addition to taking the survey, we ask that you share this with every programmer that you know (because we know not everybody who codes visits Stack Overflow or reads the blog). Drop the link in your work’s #engineering chat channel, share in on your social media accounts, and get folks involved however you can.
We learned last year that a surprising number of people who code aren’t doing it for work, but as a hobby or a form of continuing education. We want to hear from those voices as well. Here’s an incredible stat we came across recently: most big business surveys peg the number of active software developers around the globe at 20-25 million. But over 50 million unique visitors come to Stack Overflow every month. There are twice as many people working with code as recorded in official stats, and we want to hear from all of you.
Despite the broad reach of Stack Overflow, we don’t manage to reach everyone. Previous surveys have indicated that we still need to do some work to welcome everyone, and we’re committed to improving year-over-year, which includes gauging the welcomeness of our site through questions in the survey. So please, if you code in any capacity, contribute to the survey. And if you have friends that code but don’t typically use Stack Overflow, send them the link and encourage them to share their thoughts.
One thing to note: if you use a third-party ad-blocking plugin, you may see error messages during the survey. Our third-party survey partner, Qualtrics, doesn’t work very well with certain ad-blockers and security software. To avoid issues that may prevent you from taking the survey, we ask that you specifically unblock Qualtrics in your plugins or pause the plugin while you take the survey.
So get in there and tell us what it’s like being a developer in 2020! We’ll share our results in a few months once everyone has had their say and we’ve had time to analyze the insight you’ve given us.