26,086 people from 157 countries participated in Stack Overflow 2015 developer survey. The 45-question survey was taken by full-stack developers, mobile developers, front-end developer, etc. The goal of the survey was to help Stack Overflow better understand the community and help the community understand itself better as well.
According to the survey, 32 million people from all over the world visit Stack Overflow monthly, and over 25 million people are return visitors who visit the website 6 times per month. Luxembourg, Iceland, Sweden, Israel, Finland and Singapore were among the top 6 countries with most return users per 1,000 people. Luxembourg has the biggest number of returned users with 39.8 devs per 1,000 people. Somalia, Chad, North Korea, Congo, Mali and South Sudan are the countries with the least number of devs per 1,000 people.
The survey indicates that the average age of a developer is 28.9 years old. The average age of programmers in the United States is 31,6 while in India the age of an average developer is only 25 years old. There is an imbalance in gender gap with 92.1% male developers and just 5.8% female developers. Interestingly enough, Indian developers, besides being the youngest ones, are 3 times more likely to be females compared to developers in the United States according to the survey.
Another interesting fact was that 41.8% of developers all around the world are self-taught, 37.7% have a Bachelor degree in Computer Science or in a related field and 36.7% of them got on-the-job training. Swift, C++11, Rust, Go, Clojure , Scala and F# are the most loved programming languages and technologies and Javascript, SQL, Java, C#, PHP, Python and C++ are the most wanted programming languages and technologies among developers.
Windows 7 for the third year in a row resulted the most used operating system for 33.8% of the 22,771 developer responses; Mac OS X comes second with 21.5 % and Linux comes third with 20.5% according to the survey.
“Of more than 22,000 respondents, 1,900 said they are primarily a mobile developer. Android developers outnumber iOS developers 4 to 3. Just over 2% of mobile developers identify as Windows Phone developers. 20% of mobile developers don't identify with a particular mobile platform.”
Remote working is gaining a lot of popularity among developers. For 16.7% of developers, working remote is very important and for 29.1% of them, working remote is somewhat important. “Stack Overflow users with 5,000+ rep are twice more likely than other developers to say "remote optional" is non-negotiable,” according to Stack Overflow 2015 developer survey.
Stack Overflow asked respondents whether they are satisfied with the work they do or not. 76% of the survey respondents said that they are satisfied with their job, 36% love their job and only 1.9% hate their job. 97.5% of developers are employed. 66.3% of them are employed full-time, 9% work freelance and 4.2% are employed part-time. If you are a developer, chances are you are already employed full time/part time and you are satisfied with your job.
“Executives are 16% more satisfied (on an arbitrary 5-point scale) than average (3.36). Product managers are generally the least satisfied with their jobs.”