The 2020 Developer Survey is now open!
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.
18 Comments
Ok I am ready
If you want to be welcoming your survey should even work without javascript, blind readers, high contrast set-ups etc.
I’m pretty sure simply choosing Qualtrics excluded a bunch of people.
I have been thinking that Android is easy to overcome IOS for many years, I have experienced a lot on IOS which always makes me feel uncomfortable. Just like an app game. Android takes 1 minute to handle but IOS can take 3 to 4 minutes to complete.
Personal experience comments
Well, at least you got dark mode; that’s a nice thing. I’ve been asking for this for a long time. However, the problems that you’ve been creating since the summer of 2019, need to be prioritized above dark mode.
A gentle yearly reminder that you need to add an option to the Education question for those that completed college. The “some college/uni” answer feels like the “I dropped out” option which is not appropriate. As such respondents either fake their answer and pick something incorrect or choose not to respond.
This change was requested and recommended years ago.
I don’t see anything wrong with that wording. “Some college/uni” doesn’t restrict to people who dropped out, and if whoever is doing the question fakes their answer because they’re assuming as such is more on them.
Last year, your team said you’d consider not using Qualtrics again, since that service *excludes entire countries* (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/379318/why-cant-i-open-the-2019-developer-survey-link?noredirect=1&lq=1#comment665237_379352).
Disappointing to see you haven’t done this, so the survey remains uninclusive. So much for “represent[ing] everyone who codes” – perhaps you meant only those in the USA?
Hello Asteroid – sorry we couldn’t make that change. One of our developers addressed the issue here – https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393664/the-2020-developer-survey-link-is-blocked-in-my-country/393701#393701
Maybe it’s not important, but Qualtrics is inaccesible from Cuba
Any reason Clojure was not included as a language this year? It was included last year, and the community has continued to grow. Many in the community have resolved to writing it in this year.
Any expected date for the results?
Why do the links tell me that “We’re sorry, but the 2019 Developer Survey is now closed. See you next year, when we launch the 2020 Developer Survey.”
What year is this? Have I gone back in time??? Again???
If you have, so have I, because I’m getting the same message from the link in the article.
still waiting for the results!!
Is there any kind of timeline as to when the results are going to be released?
it’s in their interest to wait as long as possible, they are enjoying the web traffic people checking back daily for the results. site probably goes quiet after the results are announced.
Visual Basic .net?
VB.Net. VB.Net. VB.Net. Hello? WTF. There’s a huge number of VB.Net developers who are being sidelined because someone decided that VB.Net isn’t popular or something. Excuse me, but VB.Net kicks C# in the balls. Because C# forces case sensitivity and VB.Net doesn’t So you have a much easier time with VB.Net maintaining code than with C#. Why add more headache to your stack than you need? VB.Net is much better than C# to work with, but the C# folks who snubbed VB.Net from the beginning (coming from their haughty C++ backgrounds) have no idea how many code errors they could have easily avoided had they only tried VB.Net and found out that case sensitivity is an anachronistic absurdity that has no place in the modern world. But now for some reason everyone wants to abandon VB.Net. What the hell people.