New decade, new survey goals (and reminder to take the survey before it closes next week!)

Update 2/24: An issue with our email platform prevented our reminder email from reaching the majority of intended recipients, so we’re extending the survey deadline to Friday, February 28. This is your last last chance!

We’re two weeks into collection of data for our 2020 Developer Survey. If you haven’t yet taken the survey, be sure to do so before it closes on February 25th. Read on for background on this year’s survey, what we hope to achieve this year, and how you can help.

Primarily, you can take the survey!

First, a little background. There’s been some debate internally as to whether the Annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey is in it’s 10th or 11th year. Our oldest blog post on the matter from December 2010 aligns with the oldest data set available on our site from 2011, but a post from Meta Stack Exchange in early 2010 indicates the first survey was conducted in late 2009. Regardless of whether this year marks the 10th or 11th iteration, we’ve certainly come a long way since the early days of the Developer Survey. 

What started as an effort to learn more about our community and how its members work has evolved into an asset that is used by professionals and publications around the world to do things like gauge the popularity of technologies, analyze the happiness of technical employees, and even address the gender and cultural gaps in the world of coding. While we (naturally) want the validity and use of our data in this manner to continue, we’re aiming for a bit more this year. 

If you’re a regular reader of our blog, or if you subscribe to our newsletter or listen to the podcast, you’ve hopefully noticed a theme of focusing on our community as it grows. Our community doesn’t end with visitors of Stack Overflow. We want Stack Overflow to be a resource for everyone who codes, just as we want our 2020 Developer Survey to represent everyone who codes. To aid in this effort, we included questions in our Annual Survey to gauge sentiment around the welcomingness of Stack Overflow, to ask what other technical communities respondents utilize, and to inquire whether or not survey takers consider themselves to be members of our community, regardless of their network usage. 

In order to achieve our goal of obtaining a data set representative of everyone who codes, and, more importantly, continuing the work that is necessary to serve underrepresented groups of coders who may not feel welcome on Stack Overflow, we need to reach beyond our networks. We’re working on this internally by strategically advertising the Survey to followers of affinity coding groups and emphasizing our desire to learn about the coding universe as a whole, no matter where they live or what websites they frequent for troubleshooting technical problems. These efforts can only take us so far, though, so we’re asking for your help. 

First and foremost, we ask that you share the survey with your networks. Whether your contacts code for a living or need to write a few lines here and there, we want to learn about how they work. But beyond sharing, we’re requesting your recommendations. Where should we focus our outreach to reach underrepresented (whether that’s gender, race, geo-location, you name it) coding hobbyists and professional alike? What sites, mediums, and methods will help the most in these efforts? What groups should we reach out to? We’re open to suggestions and appreciate your input. 

Stack Overflow was, and continues to be, built by developers for developers. And everything we do, we do to serve needs within the developer community. Whether that’s helping visitors find a new product or job or improving communication with Stack Overflow for Teams, our endless goal is to serve the developer community. We recognize that in order to serve the developer community as a whole, we need to understand the needs of the developer community as a whole, and to do that, we need to reach them. 

So take the survey and share it with anyone who codes.