[Ed. note: The survey is now closed. Thank you to everyone who participated!]
Fifteen years. Few things in the technology community last as long as fifteen years, and the 15th Annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey is in good company with the other community spaces that have made it 15 or more years (hello, YouTube and Wikipedia). In fact, we’re wondering what kind of online communities Stack Overflow users continue to support in the age of AI and whether AI is becoming a closer companion than ever before. This year, we're not just collecting data; we're reflecting on the last year of questions, answers, hallucinations, job changes, tech stacks, memory allocations, models, systems and agents—together.
What we've heard and what we're still curious about
Last year's survey unveiled some thought-provoking insights that we're eager to revisit and delve deeper into.
Developer happiness: A key finding from recent surveys highlighted a significant statistic: 80% of developers reported being unhappy or complacent in their jobs. This raised questions about changing office (and return-to-office) culture and the pressures of the industry, along with whether there were any insights into what could help developers feel more satisfied at work. Prior research confirmed that flexibility at work used to contribute more than salary to job satisfaction, but 2024’s results show us that remote work is not more impactful than salary when it comes to overall satisfaction. Comparing some key groups that showed higher variabilities in job satisfaction:
- In the U.S., Germany, and the U.K., hybrid and remote developers hover around 7 out of 10 in job satisfaction (the happy range for job satisfaction was 8 - 10). An increase is only noticeable among the top 25% in salary equally for those in remote or on-site roles.
- Job satisfaction remained consistent among all salary quartiles for engineering managers, embedded developers, and desktop developers. Job satisfaction increased among the top 25% in salary for mobile, back-end, and full-stack developers, raising them out of the complacent range and into the happy range.
- For roles that were not as affected by salary and indicated their job satisfaction was in the happy range, embedded developers were more likely to mention “working with top-quality hardware” contributing to their job satisfaction, desktop developers were more likely to mention “contributing to open source,” and engineering managers were more likely to mention “driving strategy”.
The evolving landscape of developer salaries: In 2024, our data showed that many developers experienced a pay cut in various roles and programming specialties. In an industry often seen as highly lucrative, this was a notable shift of around 7% lower salaries across the top ten reporting countries for the same roles. This year, we're interested in whether this trend has continued, reversed, or stabilized. Salary dynamics is an indicator for job satisfaction in recent surveys of Stack Overflow users and understanding trends for these roles can perhaps improve the process for finding the most useful factors contributing to role satisfaction outside of salary.
- Roles that had the largest positive shift in 2024 from this data were engineering managers in the UK (+21%), and front-end devs in the UK (+15.5%) and the Netherlands (+15%)
- Roles that had the largest negative shift in 2024 were all in the Ukraine: Full-stack (-44%), front-end (-41%), and back-end developers (-39%)
- Roles with close to no change in salary in 2024 were all in Germany: full-stack, embedded applications, and desktop/enterprise applications developers all hovered at 0.3% change
AI: AI adoption is climbing but sentiment is stalled. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid integration into the developer workflow, with more and more developers leveraging AI tools for tasks from code generation to documentation. However, last year's survey also revealed a fascinating dichotomy: while AI usage is growing (70% in 2023 vs. 76% in 2024 planning to or currently using AI tools), developer sentiment isn't necessarily following suit, as 77% in of all respondents in 2023 are favorable or very favorable of AI tools for development compared to 72% of all respondents in 2024. Concerns about accuracy and misinformation were prevalent among some key groups:
- More developers learning to code are using or are interested in using AI tools than professional developers (84% vs. 77%).
- Front-end (69%), mobile (65%), and full-stack (65%) developers are the roles with highest usage of AI tools.
- Developers with 10 - 19 years experience were most likely (84%) to name "increase in productivity" as a benefit of AI tools, higher than developers with less experience (<80%).
- Developers from India had the highest percentage of users that find AI tools trustworthy (59%) and Germany had the highest percentage of those that decidedly did not trust AI tools (42%)
AI-enhanced, human-approved: what new tech trends are we asking about this year?
So much has happened in a year. Somehow, even more has happened in a year in tech. We continue to ask our community about it all.
- Is it an AI agent revolution yet? Are you building or utilizing AI agents? We want to know how these intelligent assistants are changing your daily workflow and if developers are really using them as much as these keynote speeches assume. We're asking if you are using these tools and where humans are still needed for common developer tasks.
- Career shifts: We're keen to understand if you've considered a career change or transitioned roles and if AI is impacting your approach to learning or using existing tools. Did we make up the difference in salaries globally for tech workers?
- Community: We are asking more community questions this year, not only because community is the foundation of the Developer Survey but also because it informs a larger understanding of how AI is really transforming online spaces.
New community insights start here today
The first step to getting real insights about developers and the technology community is to take the survey to explore all the new questions and help us tell the global community what real developers are doing today!