56,033 coders in 173 countries took part in a recent survey by Stack Overflow. The survey, which was developed in English, contained 45 questions from more common ones to what languages developers know to most random one such as whether developers prefer cats or dogs.
With 13,540 respondents from the United States, 4,573 from the United Kingdom, 4,193 from India, 1,188 from the Netherlands, and thousands of respondents from almost all the continents, the survey showed that 28% are Full-Stack Web Developers, 12.2% Back-End Web Developers, 11.4% students, 8.4% are Mobile Developers (Android, iOS, WP, and Multi-Platform), 6.9% desktop developers, 5.8% Front-End web developer, etc. The smallest percentages were taken by Enterprise Level Services Developers, Embedded Application Developers, DevOps, Data Scientists, Executives, Engineering Managers, Analysts, etc.
As of January 2016, out of 46 million people that visited Stack Overflow in order to get help or give help to fellow developers, 16 million were professional developers.
“Our estimate on professional developers comes from the things people read and do when they visit Stack Overflow. We collect data on user activity to help surface jobs we think you might find interesting and questions we think you can answer. You can download and clear this data at any time,” according to Stock Overflow.
Out of 49, 525 responders, the majority of them consider themselves as Full-stack Developers compared to other roles they may have. According to the survey, Full-stack developers are comfortable coding with 5 to 6 major languages or frameworks compared to 4 languages that the rest of respondents are comfortable with, while executives are pretty comfortable using way more languages and frameworks.
“There are roughly just as many developers who call themselves Mobile Developers as there are Android Mobile Developers (3% for each). About 2.5% of all developers are iOS Mobile Developers. We received 59 responses from Windows Phone Mobile Developers (.1%).”
The survey also showed the most popular technologies for different types of Developers, including Full-stack ones, Front-End, Back-End, Mobile, Math and Data, and Students. The most popular programming language for Full-stack developers was JavaScript with 85.35, followed by SQL with 58.9%, C# with 37.3%, PHP with 35.3%, Angular with 32.2%, Java with 30.7%, etc.
The most popular programming language for Front-End devs was once again JavaScript with 90.5%, followed by Angular, PHP, Node.js, etc. JavaScript and SQL were among the top programming languages used by Back-End developers with 54.5% and 53.3% respectively.
“JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on earth. Even Back-End developers are more likely to use it than any other language,” according to Stack Overflow.
While most of developers (95%) identify themselves as programmers, Senior developers, Full-Stack developer, engineer, etc, there are still a few that consider themselves as ninjas (9.8%), guru ( 5%), and rockstars (7.4%).
With an average developer age of 29.6 years old from the overall number of respondents taken into account, the average age per country differed for each country.
The average age for developers in the United States is 32, in Italy 31.6, in Australia 31.5, Germany 29.8, while developers from India, Brazil, Poland, and Russian Federation are the youngest ones, which according to Stack Overflow, can be seen as the top countries for developer growth.
“The average developer has about 6.5 years IT or programming experience. This isn’t necessarily professional experience (the average student tells us they have 3.4 years experience). Developers gain experience by building things, even if they’re doing it unpaid or part-time. We've found this experience distribution to closely match that of more than 230,000 developers who make their CVs available on Stack Overflow,” according to the survey.
Huge gender gap continues to exist in almost every country from where respondents send their answers. Out of 55.128 responses, 92.8% were men, 5.8% were women, while 1.5% chose the ‘other’ option or preferred to not disclose their gender. Nevertheless, Stack Overflow explains that even though there were only 5.8% of responses coming from women, in reality, the number of women involved in technology field is much higher.
According to Quantcast, “about 12% of Stack Overflow's readers are women. (We don't actively track gender internally.) We also know this survey under represents people in countries where developers have an increased likelihood of being women such as Asian countries like South Korea, India, and China.”
As for the profession chosen by women, 12.4% of them are designers, 11.6% quality Assurance, 10.6% work as Front-End web developers, etc. Among other professions were Data Scientists, Students, Analysts, Growth Hacker, DevOps, Graphic programmer, etc. “While women make up about 6% of total respondents, they make up an even smaller percentage of respondents in their 30s and 40s. The gender disparity in tech is shamefully imbalanced across the age spectrum,” the survey found.
Diversity for a big part of developers is very important with approximately 73% of developers responding that diversity is “at least somewhat important in the workplace” and 41% of them admitting that “diversity is very important.”
What is really interesting is that according to most of responses coming from 40,183 responses excluding students, 69.1% of all developers are self-taught, and 43.9% of them were trained on the job. The rest of the responses included developers that have a degree in the field, either a BA or a PhD in Computer Science or Related Field, have had some full-time program, have taken online courses, etc.
Moving on to the next survey’s founding, JavaScript was ranked as the most popular programming language in 2016 from 55.4% of 49,397 respondents followed by SQL with 49.1%, Java with 36.3%, C# with 30.9%, PHP with 25.9%, etc. Ruby and Objective-C were ranked on the bottom with 8.9% and 6.5% respectively. Last year JavaScript, SQL as well as Java had the exact same ranking but with different percentages as the number of respondents was lower compared to 2016.