A quick look on StackOverflow Developer Survey 2018

Every year StackOverflow makes a great “reality check” on Software Developer’s land with their StackOverflow Developers Survey (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/). The 2018 version has just been released and contains great insights on how more than 100.000 developers see current interesting technologies, how they feel about their work and especially interesting “how current developers look like” (namely: what are the profile traits of developers).

Bellow I give an overview of some interesting points on “developer profile” and “technology” sections from this year’s survey. But check out the survey as this is by no means an extensive analysis and there are some other interesting sections.

developers profile

• BE, Full-stack and FE developers are still the top three most common developer roles; Data Scientists & ML specialists are showing up, but still count for very small percentage of the overall developers population.
• about a third of the respondents who are professional developers have learned to code within the last 5 years. This seems like a bit strange, but looking the the data (especially the age of respondents) it actually makes sense, namely: about 1/4 of the respondents are younger than 25 years old, which is probably not 100% representative of how the real population of developers out in the world are, it is however it makes sense that such age group is a real representation of a great number of the StackOverflow users.
• bootcamps: are seen many times as a way to “quickly get a job”, however the survey shows that most participants in fact already have a job and participate of such events to learn new skills or move to a new industry.
• connection and/or competing with peers: it is interesting (and in my view highly positive) to observe that most developers “feel a sense of kinship or connection with other developers”. Although a rather significant amount also feel “competing with their peers”. This group is mostly made by people with few years of coding experience. The results show that as years go by these levels of “competition” decrease considerably. That is a good/constructive thing in my view.
• life outside work: 71.1% have no children, which at a first sight looks like a surprising number. However, again, if we correlate it with the age of respondents, we can see that 3/4 is bellow 34 years old and nowadays most people have children later on their lives.
• gender: this area is one I always look forward to check and again I got “a bit disappointed” this year. The survey was answered by 92.7% male and only 6.8% female. One thinks that these statistics are changing over the last decades, but the fact is that still a very small percentage of developers are female. (Obviously, assuming that the population answering the survey is representative).

technology

• languages: JavaScript is still the most popular language with 71% of professional developers using it on their projects. After that, Java comes as the first major programming language with 45.4%, while Python has increased a lot (fastest growing language) and now is being used by 37.9% of developers (most probably due to data analytics/engineering related projects). I was also interesting to see that Kotlin is also becoming increasingly popular, surpassing other interesting and JVM languages, such as Groovy and Scala.
• frameworks: Node.js is still the top-most-popular framework (49.9%), while Angular (37.6%) still gets an edge over React (28.3%). Interesting to see that TensorFlow, Spark and Hadoop showing up on the list - clearly reflecting that ML/Big Data is becoming widely applied.
• databases: MySQL is still the database queen (58.6%), while SQL Server (41.6%) and PostgreSQL (33.3%) complete the podium. Relational databases are still the most widely used - MongoDB comes with 26.4%, however other popular NoSQL databases come with very low percentages - e.g.: Cassandra (3.7%), Neo4j (2.4%), HBase (1.7%). Cloud-managed database offerings are also used by a very small number of developers (most used on is Microsoft Azure ones with 8%), this is quite interesting to observe, given that companies are investing heavily on cloud adoption over the past few years, nevertheless their database offerings still are not very prevalent on this survey.

Till next year!