New Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016 - from Data to Insights

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A new Developer Survey by Stack Overflow showed very interesting results about what developers like and don’t like,  how many of them are professional developers, their occupation, age, gender, experience, education, which is the most popular programming language among the over 50 thousand developers that took part in the survey, and many more.

“Every 8 seconds or so, a developer asks a question on Stack Overflow. This year, 56,033 coders in 173 countries answered the call. We asked them 45 questions. Key highlights include the following: Developers love Rust. Even back-end developers know JavaScript. Only 7% of developers identify as "rockstars". Most developers prefer dogs to cats. (But not developers in Germany.),” according to Stack Overflow.

Out of 46 million people that visited Stack Overflow in January 2016, 16 million of them are estimated to be professional developers. Among the developer occupations, 28% were Full-Stack Web Developers, 12.2% Back-End Web Developers, 11.4% Students, 8.4%Mobile Developers, 6.9% Desktop Developers, 5.8% Front-End Web Developers. The rest of other developer occupations with less than 5% were Enterprise Level Services Developer, Embedded Aplication Developer, DevOps, Executives, Analyst, Data Scientists, etc.

“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%).”

As expected, JavaScript turned out to be the most popular language in the world used by 85.3% of developers and was followed by SQL, C#, PHP, Angular, Java, SQL Server, Node.js, Python, and LAMP.  According to the survey the average age of a developer is 29.6 years and countries like India, Russia, Poland, and Brazil are expected to have a huge developer growth in the future.

When it comes to experience, “worldwide, the median Front-End Web Developer has 3.5 years experience. The median Full-Stack Developer has 8 years experience. And the median Engineering Manager has 13 years experience.”

Once again, the survey showed a big gender gap with 92.8% men and only 5.8% women. Nevertheless, according to Stock Overflow, “women make up a more significant proportion of the developer workforce than this suggests. According to Quantcast, about 12% of Stack Overflow's readers are women.”

The top five most loved programming languages resulted to be Rust (79.1%), Swift (72.1%), F# (70.7%), Scala (69.4%), and Go (68.7%) in that order. The list was followed by Clojure, React, Haskell, Python, C#, and Node.js.

Visual Basil and WordPress were the two most dreaded programming languages with 79.5% and 74.3% respectively. “Newer web-development technologies like React, Node.js, and AngularJS are growing in use. So is Swift, which is stealing market share from Objective C. Developers appear to be dropping CoffeeScript, Haskell, and Windows Phone. And though the survey showed many developers want out of Visual Basic and Wordpress, those technologies don't seem to be shrinking quite yet,” according to Stack Overflow.

 

You can read the full survey results in detail here.


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