The 2020 Developer Survey results are here!
Depending on how you count it, this is the 10th year Stack Overflow has been conducting its annual developer survey. The software industry has changed substantially over the last decade, but it’s also true that no single technology has been quite as disruptive, at least in the short term, as the public health crisis the entire world is experiencing right now.
The results of this survey reflect the opinions and experiences of nearly 65,000 developers. It’s important to note, however, that the survey was conducted in February, before COVID-19 had been declared a global pandemic, and countries across the world had gone into lockdown. We’re eager to share with the public some of the interesting statistics and changes reflected in this data, but we also understand that it’s important to be humble and realistic: a lot of the answers developers gave might look very different if the same survey were conducted today.
That said, there are plenty of exciting, interesting, and amusing highlights from the 2020 Developer Survey, so let’s dive in!
The Beloved
Rust held onto it’s spot as the most beloved language among the professional developers we surveyed. That said, the majority of developers who took the survey aren’t familiar with the language. If you want to understand what makes Rust so beloved, we have a deep dive on the topic for you here. TL;DR – Rust promises performance, control, memory safety, and fearless concurrency – an enticing combination, especially for systems programming. It has also brought some interesting features – like affine types and hygienic macros – into the mainstream discourse. Coupled with an open development process, it makes sense that many programmers (even those that don’t use it) hold Rust in high esteem.
% of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it
At the number two spot, however, this year’s survey saw an interesting change. Last year, Python and Typescript shared the silver medal in a statistical dead heat. In 2020, TypeScript has surged in popularity, leaving Python in third place. If you want to hear more about Typescript, listen to our recent podcast with Jenn Schiffer of Glitch, where she explains why it’s become such a well-loved language.
TypeScript’s surge in popularity highlights Microsoft’s change of direction and embrace of the open source movement. As front end web and Node.JS codebases grow in size and complexity, adopting TypeScript’s static typing gives developers increased confidence in their code’s correctness. TypeScript’s ability to be adopted incrementally means developers can dip their toes in, gaining immediate benefits, without having to undertake a risky porting project. As a final sweetener, TypeScript polyfills many ECMAScript changes (like arrow functions, async, and classes) before they’re widely available in browsers. We’ve been persuaded ourselves, as more and more of Stack Overflow’s JavaScript is actually transpiled TypeScript.
Python doesn’t have static typing (though it does have hints), which makes it the odd one out of the top 3. There may also be some ill will due to the much debated Python 2 to 3 migration. Let us know why you think TypeScript surged and Python slipped in the comments below. Check out the discussion at the 20 minute mark below for some more thoughts.
Old Faithful, New School
Site reliability engineers and DevOps specialists remain among the highest paid individual contributor roles. Almost 80% of respondents believe that DevOps is at least somewhat important, and 44% work at organizations with at least one dedicated DevOps employee. The reasons for this trend are no surprise. In an era of constant connectivity, users expect their apps and services to be available any time, and any place. And remember, this survey was run before widespread COVID-19 lockdowns – we’d expect DevOps to be even more important in a world where many teams have suddenly gone completely remote.
When asked what steps to take when stuck on a coding problem, 90% of respondents indicated they visit Stack Overflow. But hey, you already knew that. We also asked how people felt when they searched for a solution to their coding problem and found a purple link as the first result, indicating they’d been there before. Luckily, 52% of respondents said they felt a warm sense of recognition—“Hello, old friend”—while only 14% said they were annoyed to find they had forgotten they searched for this answer once before.

While finding a solution on Stack Overflow saves developers time, developers spend a lot of time working. More than 75% of developers said they work overtime at least occasionally—one to two days per quarter. 25% work overtime 1-2 days per week or more. As developers around the world shift to working from home, it’s becoming harder to draw boundaries between work and life, and to balance the two. We’ve got some advice on learning to work asynchronously, socializing with co-workers while you’re social distancing, and tips from some veterans of remote work here at Stack.
Some Parting Thoughts
While we continue to make progress on diversity and inclusion, we still have a long way to go. This year’s survey was taken by just over 65,000 people. In our efforts to reach beyond the Stack Overflow network and seek representation from a greater diversity of coders, we advertised the survey less on our own channels than in previous years and sought ways to earn responses from those who may not frequent our sites. This approach included social promotion and outreach to underrepresented coders.
While we saw a lift in underrepresented groups, the difference in representation isn’t as large as we had hoped. There was an uptick in some race and ethnicity groups, while other races and ethnicities remained similar or decreased. Similarly, we saw a slight increase in female-gendered respondents, while non-binary, genderqueer, or non-conforming remained the same. We acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do, and the data we obtain in our annual survey helps us make changes and set goals to become more welcoming and inclusive as we go forward.
We will continue to work on improving our relationship with every kind of coder. In responses to this year’s survey, more than 15% of people said they find Stack Overflow at least somewhat more welcoming than last year. This continues to be one of our organization’s top priorities, and this news is encouraging.
You can explore more of the results in the detailed breakdown here. As always, we’ll make the anonymized results of this year’s survey publicly available under the Open Database License (ODbL) shortly.
Our annual developer survey is typically one of our most widely read releases. We know this is a challenging time for many people, and that folks around the globe are feeling a great disruption. We hope that Stack Overflow continues to serve as a valuable resource for you, and that this community can come together to support one another.
Tags: dev ops, dev survey, dev survey 2020, developer survey, hello - old friend, overtime, python, remote work, rust, stack overflow, stack overflow dev survey, stackoverflow, typescript
51 Comments
I really like Typescript. But C# is my home base for coding.
I develop most in ASP.NET. I really love TypeScript, but Blazor (C#) is looking to replace that for my front end work.
Your language is not important. It does not define who you are. Took this from Fabio Akita @akitaonrails. He explains very well why a language is important but we, as developers, should not be blind advocates of them. They were all created copying old languages ideias designed in the 50′ and or 60’s, they all share same ancestors in a way or another, they were all created by someone to solve one type of problem and should not be thought at silverbullets to try to solve all problems. There’s a usage curve when it’s good to be an advocate and when the language reaches the maturity and then it falls in usage. Always learn a new language because it’s interesting and to expand your horizon. Who knows if it’s gonna be the next black swan in the future there the person who knows it will be very valuable in the field.
I like this information.
But I have one question..
I am learning python now and i feel very comfortable and easy while learning it. Also my day to day interest is going increasing in python.
My dream to become Python Developer/Programmer. Doe it has Scope in India?
Rust / Kotlin seems like a good choice for programming languages to learn right now.
So I can think that there is no future in C++ 😱😭😭
It depens how much longer you live, or specifically, able to work. I think its still relatable in the next 15 years. And you know, high demand, low availbility = high salary. So I think you’re safe my friend
🙂 or Java
Sorry, Java isn’t in fashion right now, the cool kids arent using it. The cool kids these days are all about Javascript, Python, Rust and Kotlin… and the real hipsters are all about Typescript but you gotta be way cool to use that language. I’ve consulted in companies where lead devs want to rewrite the entire codebase in Node and use React just because its what everyone else is doing, and there is nothing wrong with their current system.
If you liked C++ you’re gonna love Rust! 😉😉
If you liked Java, you’re gonna love… anything else? 😂
Thanks for sharing the result of a long(lasting) effort on understanding who the developers are and are chnaging to!
Stay safe and strong wherever whenver you all are.
Oh! God. What about the most used language for web development. PHP
With New Releases more often it has to be in the list. With PHP8, it becomes more faster than the imagination.
Sir, I am a student of 12th class and due to lockdown my two exams are pending but I want to learn all about coding.
You have any suggestions for me because you are a pro developer and know everything. So pls. Suggest me from where I start.
Thank you Sir.
Have a nice day 😊.
I am in 10th and I already know c# and Go (I am grateful to my father) This quarantine was really helpful. Learn C or python and read book and practice ,watch YouTube tutorial because they are best I suggest to see Trasversy Media
experience, take on the big (in your eyes) projects, do not be afraid to fail, once you fail, fail twenty times more, then look at what you created in AWE ;D
dry learning i find really boring and slow. but taking a problem, and finding a solution to it, and having someone aprecieate it, and that you can see it in real life, this is pure beauty. this is what makes me wanna code. and i do hate coding. but i do love the effects of it. 🙂 enjoy.
Great question Prince Raj.
You have choose great future option as programmer.
First you should learn the basic concepts of Computer Science, i. e. basic hardware and software Components.
After that you can choose ‘C’ language as beginner or you may go for python directly. If u are really interesting in Python then learn different libraries like Numpy, SciPy etc.
And one more thing Technology changes day by day, so be update what are the skill sets required to hire a job in IT company…
…
Best of Luck..
Hi, are you from WBCHSE?
> What about the most used language for web development. PHP
Sorry, WordPress is still not considered a language.
Who told you wordpress was a language silly dev😱
Are we still going to pretend that PHP is terrible even though this is a outdated sentiment? Just because your lead dev tried it out in 2001 and hated it and immediately switched to something else doesn’t mean it’s still terrible. And yes, people still use wordpress because you can get websites up and running very quickly and easily. I stopped building simple websites years ago so I dont bother with wordpress anymore but it doesnt mean its a terrible platform, it’s just not made for us. We are not its target user base, people who know little or nothing about coding are, the same goes for Wix.
Yes, it’s still terrible, language itself is not, but the majority of developers/code around it are terrible. (Language itself actually depends on person, personally I feel lack of compilation step off putting, I want to build my project once, and I want to know where syntax errors are, where are type errors etc).
PHP by default makes you write shitty code, consider the older amazon s3 example:
var something = new S3Client([‘bucket’ => ”, ‘sceret’ => ”, ‘app_id’ => ”);
I’ve mispelled secret, it won’t throw error on this line, it’ll throw on later line, this is how most PHP projects do,
But you CAN create an effort to create a class called S3Config and pass that in, so you CAN write good as well, but by default, majority of PHP developers are shit, and code produced is shit, and lack of compilation/build isn’t for me.
That’s the best I could do for PHP, (I really really hate it, still!)
i honestly dont see a reason to drop it. it is good all arounder, and with v7 it made a massive difference already to be on par with others. we got a massive library of knowledge on it.
i dont mind picking something else to that, each tool has its use. my next is c/c++. 🙂
I’d be interested to see developer salaries throughout a career, in particular how much it rises per year and thus what companies should be roughly aiming for as pay rises per year to avoid developers leaving to get a higher salary elsewhere. In particular is it a higher % increase for the first few years, does it drop off later etc.
+1 on this.
there is a problem with salaries in IT sector in general. they can wary wildly, regardless of skills, experience, value etc. for now it is more intrinsic value than a more streamlined approach. speaking from experience, and my observations on this matter. this is for both parts, employees, and contractors/freelancers/b2b. this also looks to be regardless of level company is trading at (the one that hires IT guys).
in plain terms, you can get good paid job without much of experience, and you can have not so good paid one even tho you are rocking it.
What Happened to Ruby?
I Love Flutter 😍😍😍😜😍
Python betrayed by its users. When they just a little noob they choose python as their favorite language but, now they just left python as their skills growth and their programming knowledge deepen. But I’m a faithful guy, I’ll love you till the end, my python. Python is my friend when everyone left me.
+1 for Python ! 🤍
Agreed. I started off with Python, but Java and C++ (despite massive unfair decompagning of C++) are increasingly becoming my favourites. Coming from Java, there are more compeling reasons to learn Kotlin.
Were the preferred text editors/IDE’s no longer queried among the development tools?
I was thinking the same thing. I seem to recall that IDEs were a part of the survey. Perhaps this is just a summary of the results?
Me too. I’m really missing that question
“Depending on how you count it, this is the 10th year Stack Overflow has been conducting its annual developer survey. ”
How should/could one count it other than “we’ve asked this survey nine times before, so this is the tenth time we’ll be asking it”?
Maybe the first time it was answered was the zeroth time it was asked?
Not really. Check with ROS increasing usage of C++ and Python.
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-profile-age-and-experience-by-country-average-years-of-coding-experience shows Australia but https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#developer-profile-age-and-experience-by-country-average-age shows does not. Does anyone know why?
Hey stackoverflow, care to elaborate why you’ve removed Clojure despite its growing popularity?
Directly from your article about Rust:
1. “That said, the majority of developers who took the survey aren’t familiar with the language.”
Then on the legend of the graphic:
2. “% of developers who are developing with the language or technology and have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it”
So which one is it?
“Last year, Python and Typescript shared the silver medal in a statistical dead heat. In 2020, TypeScript has surged in popularity, leaving Python in third place.”
LOL, yes an increase of 0.4% is definitely a “surge” 🙂
> more than 15% of people said they find Stack Overflow at least somewhat more welcoming than last year
This is cool. I am curious to know what you have been doing to make Stack Overflow more welcoming?
The question of the relative popularity of python versus typescript strikes me as an odd one. At the risk of asking a dumb question, I venture “might typescriipt show as more popular just because more people are doing front-end work than before?”
Lord have mercy of the programmers forced by Excel’s popularity to develop in VBA…
The difference between TypeScript and Python is so small, I’d say it’s still a tie for second place. I definitely wouldn’t say that TypeScript “surged in popularity” or that Python slipped. It’s pretty much even.
Why did it take 4 months to tally up 65,000 survey results?
Here’s an idea for a question, settle the naming convention of “Id” vs “ID”.
Which is correct?
– CustomerId
– CustomerID
Any idea when the anonymized version of the data will be available? Would love to dig a bit by myself
Im a guy coming from a solid background in systems administration in Windows and Linux, with knowledge of python. Im interested in Malware Analysis and Reverse Engineering. Anyone with a roadmap for learning ?
…oh My…
I start worry about my job
I use PHP
what to choose java or python ????