Results of a large survey among developers of all countries for 2016

Hi, Habr! We at PayOnline , which organizes payments on websites and mobile applications, decided to translate interesting analytical material - a global survey among developers for 2016, conducted by the Stack Overflow site. In order not to bore you with reading really extensive research, we chose the most interesting, in our opinion, slides.


general information

Every 8 seconds (or so), one of the developers publishes a question on Stack Overflow. In the same year, it was the turn of Stack Overflow: more than 56 thousand developers from 173 countries answered the questions asked.
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In total, they were asked 45 questions. In short, we get the following picture:

The developers love Rust. Even backend developers know javascript. Only 7% of developers consider themselves "real rock stars". Most developers prefer dogs to cats (with the exception of programmers from Germany).

Polls are not perfect. Despite the fact that the huge sample size helped get rid of some preconceptions, the survey is still biased against developers who do not speak English, or those who prefer not to take part in surveys conducted in English. In some sections, the survey results are supplemented with data extracted from analyzing the behavior of 40 million service users.

This report uses the interchangeable terms “developers,” “programmers,” “respondents,” and “respondents.”

DEVELOPER PORTRAIT

Who writes the code? More people than ever, while they are scattered around the world.

1. Geography



In January, 46 million people visited Stack Overflow, asking for help or helping another developer. According to some estimates, about 16 million of these people are professional developers (the assessment of the professionalism of developers comes from an analysis of what they read or do on the site).

Almost one and a half thousand domestic developers took part in the survey.

2. Developer specialization


49,525 replies

Most respondents consider themselves to be integrated development specialists. As a rule, full stack developers can easily speak 5-6 main programming languages ​​or frameworks (all the rest are only 4). Lead developers work with more languages ​​and frameworks than other developers, which is likely the result of their greater experience.

Approximately the same number of specialists consider themselves to be mobile developers, as well as mobile developers for the Android platform (3% each). Approximately 2.5% of all programmers create mobile apps for iOS. And 59 people reported that they work with mobile applications for Windows Phone (1%).

Most popular technologies for various categories of developers

Full stack:


Front end:


Backend:


Mobile technologies:


Mathematics and data:


Students:


JavaScript is the most common programming language on planet earth. Even backend developers prefer it to any other languages.

3. Programmers, engineers, and developers


55,735 replies

This year, the developers were asked whether they are engineers, experts, hackers, or fit any of the other descriptions that can often be seen in job offer lists, on business cards and biographies on Twitter.

95% of respondents are developers, programmers, engineers, senior developers and developers of the full stack. Embedded application developers are most likely among engineers. The developers of graphics programming probably identified themselves as programmers in this survey. Most of the survey participants call themselves "simple" developers.

4. Age


55,338 replies

The average developer is 29.6 years old. The median is 27 years.

Average age by country


The results are shown of countries to which more than 1000 people have attributed themselves.

The average developer in India is 6 years younger than in the United States. Thinking about the future of programming? Pay attention to India, Russia, Poland and Brazil.

5. Experience


49,521 replies

The average developer has approximately 6.5 years of experience in IT or programming. This is not necessarily professional experience (as a rule, students claim that they have (on average) 3.4 years of experience). Developers gain experience by creating various things, even if they do not get paid for it or work part-time.

Worldwide, front-end web developers have an average of 3.5 years of experience, full-stack developers are 8 years old, technical managers are 13 years old.

Star Wars vs. Star trek



42,503 replies

Developers were asked what they prefer the most - Star Wars (Star Wars) or Star Trek (Star Trek). It is clearly seen that the preferences for science fiction franchises differ depending on the age of the respondents. Developers who are between 20 and 40 years old prefer Star Wars. Those who are over 40 pay tribute to Star Trek. If we talk about the television series, the most respondents voted for the project "Firefly", then among the leaders are "Stargate" (Stargate), "Doctor Who" (Doctor Who), and "Babylon 5" (Babylon 5).

6. Paul


55,128 replies

These results show a huge difference in the number of men and women employed in the studied profession. However, women actually make up a larger percentage of the total number of developers. According to Quantcast, about 12% of Stack Overflow readers are women. In addition, this study does not fully reflect the situation in Asian countries (as too few people from this region participated in the survey), where the number of women developers is greater than in other countries (for example, South Korea, India and China) .

7. Ethnic and socio-cultural diversity

Who likes ethnic and sociocultural diversity?


42,156 replies

Overall, approximately 73% of developers consider ethnic and sociocultural diversity at work important. 41% of respondents say that it is very important. And developers, who most often have an influence when hiring new employees, are more disposed to think so than all other developer categories.

8. Education


40 183 responses from non-student developers

69% of all developers tell us that they are self-taught - at least in part (while 13% of respondents all over the world answered that they gained their knowledge solely through self-study). 43% of developers have a bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field, 2% of developers can boast a doctoral degree.

TECHNOLOGY

Tools and industry trends.

9. Most Popular Technologies


49,397 replies

The most popular programming language is javascript. But the PHP language, apparently, with the advent of Node and Angular fell into disfavor.

Most Popular Technologies - Other

Used:

6,474 respondents reported using “other” languages ​​or technologies

Desired:

6,474 respondents reported that they would like to use “other” languages ​​or technologies

Of the languages ​​and technologies proposed in the survey, Delphi received the most popularity, and from the fact that the developers entered on their own, Typescript stands out. Yes, OCaml fans, you can see well too!

10. The most beloved, frightening and desirable

Favorite:

% of developers who use language or technology and want to continue working with them

Frightening:

% of developers who use language or technology and do not want to continue to work with them

Desired:

% of developers who do not use language or technology but would like to work with them

For the second year in a row, Rust, Swift and Go were among the top five favorite programming language developers. VB is the first in the list of the most intimidating technologies - probably, the developers would only be happy to see it disappear. Programmers who currently do not use Android, Node and Angular would like to work with them.

11. The most highly paid technology

USA:

Specified annual salary

The whole world:

Among 41 117 developers from 30 countries with the largest number of respondents. The figures shown are the percentage that makes up the salary of the respondents from the average salary of the developers in the countries where the survey participants were located.

It seems the rain is starting! Cloud technology brings good money. Technologies that are often used in finance are also very profitable for developers. Spark, Scala, Cassandra and F # are the first in the list of the most paid technologies (by the way, this year’s list is very similar to last year’s).

The highest paid technology, depending on the specialization

Full stack:

Among the 3,095 full-stack developers in the US using JavaScript

Front end:

Among 604 US frontend developers using javascript

Maths:

Among 578 developers in the USA (specialists in data processing and analysis, machine learning, developers related to statistics and mathematics)

Mobile technologies:

Among 715 mobile application developers in the US

Full stack developers who know JavaScript and work in the field of cloud computing or use React or Redis, receive higher salaries than other developers working in the same field.

Frontend developers who know JavaScript and React, Node or Angular, get more than other frontend developers.

Mathematics-related developers (including data processing, machine learning, and machine learning) who know Scala, Spark, or Hadoop are paid more than other developers in the same field. Python and R are equally paid, although twice as many developers in this area know exactly Python.

Mobile developers who know the iOS ecosystem, apparently, earn about 10 thousand dollars more than Android developers.

12. Related Technologies

2 technologies:


3 technologies:


4 technologies:

49,396 respondents reported that they use at least one programming language or technology

The average developer regularly uses 4-5 major programming languages, frameworks and technologies. The most common combination of the two technologies is JavaScript and SQL. The most common combination of the three technologies is JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

13. Development environments


46,613 replies

This year the list has been expanded - IDE, text editors and other tools for writing code are included. The average developer uses 2-3 of the development environments indicated on the graph. Additionally, the developers most often entered WebStorm (1.6%), brackets (0.8%), QT Creator (0.7%) and Delphi (0.4%).

14. Desktop operating systems



Last year, Mac outpaced Linux and was the second most used operating system among developers. The results of this year’s survey only confirmed this trend. If the pace of transition to other operating systems is sustainable, then by next year less than 50% of developers will use Windows.

Speaking of Linux, Ubuntu is the most popular among the developers on the market, receiving 12.3% of the vote. Fedora, Mint and Debian received 1.4%, 1.7% and 1.9% of the votes of all developers, respectively.

JOB

Developers want to study at work, they want to have a balance of work and leisure, as well as good salaries. But mostly developers just want to write code.

15. Type of employment


A total of 49 577 people participated in the survey.

The vast majority of developers have a job. 91% of developers consider themselves to be working “on favorable terms” (working full time, working for themselves or being freelancers).

16. Priorities when choosing a job


43 878 people around the world

Salary - this is what, according to most developers, they take into account in the first place, considering the new employment opportunity. But it is not necessary that this is the decisive factor in the choice of work. At the same time, 37% of developers did not even include wages in their priority lists.

An interesting fact is that German developers, apparently, are less concerned about salary than their colleagues in other countries. American and French developers are less prone to pursuit of career growth, the British are more concerned about the location of offices, and Indian developers appreciate flexible working hours, the creation of something innovative, remote work and position.

17. Salary


46,122 survey participants reported their salary level

In general, one can trace the strong relationship between wages and job satisfaction. Can happiness be bought for money? This is partly the case. But it is also true that highly paid developers have more choices, and they can choose for themselves the place of work where they will be happy.

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