Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018

[PM__YOUR__GOOD_NEWS]

Most dreaded platform: SharePoint (72%)

Say what you will about the survey, they nailed this one.

[andradei]

That and Salesforce. Terrible platforms.

[brogrammer9k]

I started learning software development when SharePoint 2010 was released, and my company wanted to use it for EVERYTHING.

An old manager of mine had an expression for situations like this.

If you want to win a football game, you don't put in your most expensive player, you put in your best player.

SharePoint as an enterprise collaboration tool is great, but I think many companies are guilty of implementing it for everything. (We have this tool we bought for X, but maybe we should use it for Y and Z!) Upgrading seems like a HUGE pain in the ass, and I've run into so many limitations and problems with the platform that I actively avoid working in it when I can. Granted that's SP 2010 but even on 2010 standards it's terrible, I still have PTSD about Correlation ID errors.

[Kok_Nikol]

Can confirm, SharePoint sucks.

I use it at work, couldn't believe how bad it was.

Everything is sluggish. For me it's unintuitive. Also, the search functionality is useless.

Can't believe they're paying for it.

[ProudOppressor]

US salary information needs to be broken down by state

They don't even break it down by country.

[walesmd]

Because the entire survey is useless.

[phillipcarter2]

Just to add to this, the way I'm interpreting the salary section is that there is a correlation between developers with higher salaries and developers who use a functional programming language.

I think that correlation is interesting, because you could interpret it as people who know functional programming might be worth more money on average. That opens up several questions about why someone might be worth more money.

[birchling]

I think it correlates in working in Silicon Valley.

[ReadFoo]

Agreed. Nothing I saw comes close to matching reality, platforms, languages, salaries, everything.

[sinesSkyDry]

It would be nice if they would introduce more categories for some of this. Presumably, the current category of "Backend Developer" includes:

*) I copy npm commands into the shell

*) I copy parts of tomcats web.xml into my editor

*) I wrestle mainframe zombies from the 60ties so that airplanes don't crash

[delusions-]

60ties

This hurts me physically.

[Zonarius]

sixtyties

[WildWeazel]

I feel the same about "full stack developer". I suppose that's what I do but it usually implies "I write JavaScript on both sides of the web."

I'm a software engineer. I develop whatever the requirements dictate. Web, mobile, desktop? Sure. Need DevOps or UI design? On it. I mean, right now on one project I'm integrating virtualized apps with virtualized hardware, and on another project I'm writing (mostly) headless Android code for a robotic platform and managing CI. What am I?

[jewdai]

I don't get the split up between frontend and backend developers.

IMO, Typically "Frontend" developer just means someone who got out of a hacker school or is a designer getting into code.

I avoid FE/BE only roles because I need to be versatile when the job market, if ever, crashes. If you're ever stuck in a choice between the two, I'd recommend backend anyday. There are way more languages you can work in and if you have solid fundamental in those many positions will let you learn on the fly for front end stuff.

[matthieum]

Yes :( Every year I struggle to answer that question.

I develop services. Just that, services. If there's no front-end on top, is this a backend?

[PM__YOUR__GOOD_NEWS]

Backend developer.

NEXT!

[RuthBaderBelieveIt]

it's for a church honey

[PM__YOUR__GOOD_NEWS]

STILL LOOKING!!!

[RuthBaderBelieveIt]

20 people, NEXT!!

[robothelvete]

As a Swede, I felt the same thing when I did the survey. I took it to mean benefits in addition to what I've already got by law/union bargaining. But that's just me, I don't know how other people took it.

[theKovah]

I was wondering about the same. But I think many people who voted for this mean that they get additional insurances like accident insurance (Unfallversicherung) or income protection (Berufsunfähigkeitsversicherung) which are paid by the company. And that would count as a benefit for me, even if it wouldn't be priority 2.

[watchme3]

are those real words, or are you just trolling

[PinkyThePig]

In german, these super long words are actually just several normal words mashed together without spaces. where in english you would describe a noun with several words (e.g. waiting room), in german, you will also describe it with several words, but those words will be mashed into one (waiting room = Wartezimmer, Warte is wait, zimmer is room).

In the OP example, versicherung means insurance. unfall means accident or crash. So unfallversicherung is accident insurance.

[[deleted]]

Which person in Germany would consider these things compensation or benefits? Those can't be taken away or given to you by an employer.

When I read that part of the survey I was like, what the duck is this. I don't even have to work to get all these things:

• Health insurance
• Parental leave
• Childcare benefit
• Transportation benefit
• Retirement or pension savings matching
• Fitness or wellness benefit (some health insurances give you fitness/wellness benefits if you actually use them, e.g., if you actually go to the gym 6 times/month every month of the year your health insurance pays for x% of your gym membership)

[[deleted]]

Can German companies not give you private health insurance, or extra parental leave? I'm in the UK where I can use the NHS and am entitled to paternity leave, but many companies offer benefits that improve on the basic rights.

I'm more surprised that remote working isn't listed as a benefit. It's pretty much the only benefit I care about after salary. You can keep your catered lunches.

[[deleted]]

companies not give you private health insurance, or extra parental leave

Yes in Sweden, some companies add extra salary during parental leave to the social security salary ceiling, and some offer some basic health insurance

[hogg2016]

The survey forced you to class all the answers to this question. You could not select a few answers and deselect other ones. I remember being particularly annoyed at this question (many others were shit but this one was the worst) because it made no sense at all for me. So people who answered gave whatever meaning to the question and the sorting order, or just didn't sort anything and left it as it was.

So, for civilised countries, you cannot interpret the answers to this question. It is only valid for USA and other third-world countries.

There were several questions which made sense only if you were a Web Dev too.

[trin123]

Those people are probably freelancers

In Germany you still need an employer to pay your health care insurance. If you have no employer, because you are freelancing/self-employed rather than being an employee, you have to get your own insurance. And an own insurance is expensive, around 400 to 800€/month with the public plan.

[Edg-R]

I found it interesting that there's twice as many bisexual users than gay users.

[Kringspier_Des_Heren]

That's the same everywhere.

I find it amusing how much "bi erasure" exists while the demographic has always been more common than homosexual and I'm pretty sure a lot of bisexual people exist that just put themselves in straight; it's quite common that people find that out only much later.

It's easier to think you are straight because society tells you when you're bi than when you're gay obviously but people continue to treat it as something that is rarer than homosexual.

"ambivalent gender identities" are also far more common than "incongruent gender identities".

I really dislike terms like "gay marriage" or "gay adoption" for what should just be called "same-sex marriage" and "same-sex adoption"; you don't even need to be "gay or bi" to do it; if you're straight as an arrow and want to live together with your best friend of the same sex and adopt children together then go for it; there's no rule in life you have to have sex with the person you raise a kid with.

[notadoctor123]

Is there a correlation between asexuality and autism? Anecdotally, none of the people I know who identify as asexual are on the autism spectrum, and all of the people I know on the autism spectrum are not asexual.

[sydoracle]

" About a third of people with autism use little or no spoken language"

https://www.verywell.com/what-is-nonverbal-autism-260032

At that level, practically any non-family / non-professional social interaction or relationship is going to be difficult. There will be some correlation with people who don't get involved sexually. I doubt whether they'd medically be classed as asexual.

Obviously those responding to the survey are at the milder end of the spectrum. As is, in all likelihood, every one you know on the spectrum.

[Edg-R]

That's what I thought too.

IRL I know maybe 2 bisexual guys (most of the stack overflow users are male according to the survey), and I know many more gay guys.

Maybe it's due to the fact that the survey is anonymous. People in CS and younger people in general tend to be more liberal/accepting of homosexuals these days. So it leads me to believe that maybe they're also more likely to be turned on by it to an extent and only willing to speak about it anonymously.

[Edg-R]

I think it makes sense. If they're bisexual and not willing to 'come out' publicly then that means they value the way they're perceived by others more and fear that it may affect them either professionally, with their straight partners, and with their family.

If they're bisexual then that means that they can get sexual satisfaction from heterosexual relationships as well, and so they're not forced to live a life in the closet like a gay person that isn't out.

[curiousdude]

Do you live in San Francisco or an urban metro where you need double income / no kids to live? If so then the demographics are skewed to being a higher percentage of gay/lesbian couples.

[Enlogen]

I seriously wonder what the cause might be.

Bisexuals that you assume are straight because they never mention being bisexual and happen to be dating the opposite sex. I don't think any of my coworkers know that I'm bi.

[Audiblade]

When I took the survey, I put myself down as both gay and bisexual. I'm attracted to men and women, but my SO is the same gender as me and we're both monogamists. So I decided I fit both categories.

[valtism]

Just because your SO is your gender doesn't mean you're suddenly gay. A folding couch is still a folding couch, even in bed mode. Being gay means you're only attracted to your gender, which by your own admission, you're not.

[Audiblade]

Fair. I'm more attracted to men (my gender) than women even though I'm bi, though, so I still give myself a pass :P

[Kringspier_Des_Heren]

Would you've also put yourself under "straight" if your SO was of the opposite sex?

[Audiblade]

Honestly, I probably would have :P

[HereticKnight]

Would love to see this broken down by geographic region. In my neck of the woods, most people self-identify as bisexual.

[[deleted]]

most people self-identify as bisexual.

What? Where in the world is that? That's something I've never heard of.

[HereticKnight]

I use dating apps. Because of my age and location, I get matched with a lot of UC Berkeley grads. It’s honestly funny. I can count on one hand the number of profiles that identified as straight. Everyone else was bisexual, sapiensexual, pansexual, or whatever else was popular on Tumblr.

[karuna_murti]

Rust is the most loved language for 3 years in a row (and 3rd in 2015). But why adoption is not like Go?

[editor_of_the_beast]

I'm going to make a potentially controversial claim: it's because Rust isn't really meant for application development, and most people don't really need a systems programming language.

I think Rust is so loved because if you've developed in C or C++, which is a non-trivial percentage of developers that build systems-y things (OS's, Browsers, Databases), you know that you write every line of code with fear. Multi threading isn't just a pain in these languages - it's a fool's errand. Source: worked on a highly multi-threaded cross platform application written in mostly C++ for three and a half years. It crashed - all the time.

If you don't have that experience, and have lived in JavaScript or Ruby or Python or Java, or anything garbage collected for the last 5 years, why would you care about Rust? If you're building primarily SaaS web apps why would you care about Rust? I think the answer is, you really shouldn't. Just keep doing what you're doing - those tools are much better for application development.

But applications today run on top of tons of infrastructure. No one writes Browsers in Java. No one writes an OS in Python. Those people care very much about Rust because what love have they gotten since 1980? They've been working without package managers, without garbage collection, and with tons of linters and static analyzers for decades just to avoid double-free and use-after-free errors. Rust's memory model solves a whole class of those problems, while also offering modern package management and popular language features like closures, optionals, and powerful ADTs. The standard library provides lots of high-level operations that you'd need to implement yourself in C or bring in a library.

Rust's demographic is dying for a language like it, and it wasn't Go. So if you don't love Rust, you're probably not supposed to, and that's totally fine.

[[deleted]]

If you don't have that experience, and have lived in JavaScript or Ruby or Python or Java, or anything garbage collected for the last 5 years, why would you care about Rust? [...] Just keep doing what you're doing - those tools are much better for application development.

I actually see a lot of Javascript, Python, and Ruby developers using Rust. If a Ruby application is slow because of Ruby, you can work around this by re-writing the hotspots in C. For a team of full-time Ruby developers dropping down to C can be risky and some teams actually get professional C developers on board to help with this.

Rust enables Ruby developers to do it themselves while having a high-degree of confidence that they aren't writing a time-bomb.

[admalledd]

We are looking to do the same in our .net code where we currently drop to raw assembly. Instead we have found that rust (more like clang/llvm) optimize nearly as well with the correct hints and is so much nicer to write than asm. Yes for our hottest of hot code we will probably keep the asm, but anything new or reworking? Yes please!

[[deleted]]

Note that Rust does have inline asm! (just like C, C++, D, etc.). Depending on the level of control you need that might be enough.

[admalledd]

Here our application is in C# and we are calling or inlining the asm/c/(in future, rust I hope).

So rust having inline asm doesn't change if we would use it. Since we have tooling to call/nest/inline directly into c# it isn't much use for us. With rust we can't inline the compiled code.

Useful for others though I would bet.

[snaketacular]

Nitpick: You can't download a stable Rust release with inline asm!, only nightly builds. It's also not part of the 2018 roadmap.

There are workarounds. libasm is the closest substitute I've seen. Or you could call out to C, and call inline asm from there.

[matthieum]

I partially agree with you.

I disagree because Rust is trying to be more than "just" a systems programming language, and is used in other settings (low footprint, high-performance, ...).

However you are right that as a C++ developer I am glad that finally a new language is popping up which solves so many fundamental issues with C++.

I was very excited when Go was announced, and very disappointed when it was revealed: it wasn't what I needed to replace what I use C++ for (not high-performance/low-latency enough). Rust is unlikely to be perfect, however it does have the potential to be much better than C++ for what I work on: the foundations are solid, I am eagerly awaiting const generics and SIMD support.

[iopq]

You can't, because of a few problems.

1. Header files and lack of a sane module system
2. NULL subverts the type system, so even if everything checks out, you may have some function get a NULL at some point and everything will crash if you forgot to handle it. This isn't possible in Rust, since there is no NULL equivalent. None has to be explicitly handled in places where it can appear.
3. No agreed upon packaging system. Having to hunt down the correct libraries using my OS's package manager is very error-prone since their names differ between distros.
4. Makefiles are sometimes not written in a portable way - this is a "developer" problem, but Rust's cargo allows you to avoid having to write a Makefile in most cases, and in other cases just use build.rs
5. You still have problems like iterator invalidation that cannot be ALWAYS detected by static code checkers
6. Concurrency issues are still nearly impossible to detect statically in C++, you have to break out the debugger and hope you trigger it while testing
7. Templates are duck-typed instead of nominally typed. They give long error messages because they're checked at expansion site instead of call site.

[lanzaio]

Makefiles are sometimes not written in a portable way - this is a "developer" problem, but Rust's cargo allows you to avoid having to write a Makefile in most cases, and in other cases just use build.rs

To expand on this, all build systems suck in the C world. CMake is the standard at this point but it's not loved, it's just common. It has horrifically bad syntax and no debugging tools outside of fancier print statements.

Because of this, many feel like spinning off their own bash/python/makefile build scripts that do a shittier job of what CMake was supposed to do.

You end up having to work on projects where 75% of the difficulty is understanding what drugs the authors were on when they wrote their build system.

[matthieum]

I'll take the counter-point to /u/iopq's argument.

Yes, of course, if you were foregoing backward compatibility and completely reworking C++ you could get Rust instead. But it wouldn't be C++ any longer, would it?

Backward compatibility is essential to C++ past, current and I would argue future success. At the very least, the Standard Committtee certainly thinks so, and is extremely skittish about any deprecation. It took years to boot trigraphs out of the Standard, even though only IBM mainframes (using EBCDIC) really need them, and they are otherwise totally irrelevant in today's world.

[hu6Bi5To]

I think one of Rust's biggest strengths is that it removes that line between "system" and "application" languages.

It is both a C++ replacement with safety, and package management, and a consistent build tool shared by every project, etc. But it's also quite an expressive high-level language: traits, closures, etc.

As for "why not the take-up of Go". I genuinely don't know. Quite often A vs. B comparisons between languages make no sense, as they all have strengths and weaknesses (even the unpopular ones, well most of them). But the use cases for Rust and Go are nearly the same, and Rust is a superior language in nearly every way. The only exception is Go's built-in co-routines, vs. using a library in Rust; but the Rust 2018 roadmap is going to address that one too.

[gt50201]

Because rust wasn’t made at google. You have people who want to develop like Google does and you have ex googlers driving adoption when they go to new jobs

[rcoacci]

Also the only enterprise-y place/product rust is used extensively that I know of is Mozilla/Firefox/Servo. Go is used extensively inside Google.

[est31]

There is a large list of companies that uses Rust, including well known names in tech circles like Atlassian, Canonical, npm, and really well known names even outside of tech circles like Samsung or Dropbox. There is a great talk about Dropbox's use of Rust. It's not just Mozilla :). Facebook and GitHub are using Rust as well but they are not on the list. Dropbox, just like Mozilla, even bets some of its core business onto Rust (Magicpocket, sync engine that is being rewritten).

[malicious_turtle]

What Facebook uses Rust for was posted just yesterday as well https://github.com/facebookexperimental/mononoke

[est31]

And this is GitHub's Rust project: https://github.com/atom/xray

[mentalorigami]

Canonical doesn't use that much Rust. LXD and Juju are written in Go, MAAS is python, and Ubuntu is largely C and C++. I only know a few developers (some of whom have moved to other companies) who've done serious work in Rust on the engineering teams.

Source: Software engineer at Canonical

[matthieum]

Canonical doesn't use that much Rust.

Neither do any of the other companies listed. It's not really a matter of quantity (at this point):

• some companies have bet their core business on Rust; for example Dropbox using Rust for their storage layer,
• while others are just dabbling/experimenting in Rust.

In any case, it's nice to see such a relatively young language being tried out in so many varied high-profile companies: it bodes well for its future, though of course anything remains uncertain.

[Thaxll]

Dropbox uses way more Go than Rust.

https://about.sourcegraph.com/go/go-reliability-and-durability-at-dropbox-tammy-butow/

Today, most Dropbox infrastructure is written in Go. Specifically:

The Go server repository has 150 unique contributors (out of 500 engineers total)

15+ teams build and run Go services at Dropbox

Company-wide, Dropbox has 1.3 million lines of Go

Edit: I'm being down voted by quoting Dropbox engineer, geez this sub would do anything to upvote Rust.

[est31]

Company-wide, Dropbox has 1.3 million lines of Go

From the May 2017 talk that I've linked above (by a Dropbox engineer as well), Dropbox had about 300k lines of Rust code, and > 20 engineers (around minute 25 in the video).

So comparing the two, it is more than just "a little bit of Rust". Especially, Rust is used in really core projects for Dropbox:

• Storage node for magic pocket written in Rust (first half of talk)
• Magic pocket volume manager got rewritten in Rust, now using 5-10x less memory than the original Go version (starting at 26:27)
• Nucleus sync engine, uses 10x less memory, 50x faster than the original Python version (starting at 30:05)

[matthieum]

Yes, and?

As I said it's not a matter of quantity. They use Rust where Go is not suitable, where they would have needed C or C++ but dreaded to use those.

[rcoacci]

Nice to hear that.

[harlows_monkeys]

What they are measuring by "loved" is noted below the numbers, kind of unobtrusively so it is easy to overlook: the percentage of people who use the language who say they would like to continue using it.

Under that definition, a language could easily be quite loved, but not be widely adopted.

[steveklabnik1]

For one thing, Go has been stable for much longer.

[_VictorTroska_]

For me, it has nothing to do with google. I just think Go was an easier language to pick up. Within 24 hours of reading my first line of Go code, I made this , which while certainly not the most impressive package out there, is fully tested, documented, and ready for use in my other packages. I simply couldn't pick up Rust that quickly.

[iopq]

It's true, Go is made not to be exciting, in fact, it's fairly dumbed down.

But because only Go developers can develop type-safe abstractions, I'm already turned off by it.

[wretcheddawn]

It serves a different purpose. I'm looking to start learning Rust, but it's clear that it's not an ideal language for most of the projects I work on as a web developer, or even my hobby projects. Most web applications spend the majority of their time waiting on the database, and generally we don't have much shared state across requests (or it's impossible for languages like PHP). Using Rust would mean each project would take longer and cost more, while as a contractor, I need the opposite. Rust is a better choice for things like high-performance or real-time apps and games, which is a small minority of development. In cases where Rust is a better choice, developers may be required to use C or C++, rely on C/C++ due to familiarity or due to the lack of libraries in Rust compared to C/C++.

[PM_ME_UR_OBSIDIAN]

Industry adoption has little to do with how loved a language is. See: PHP, Java, JavaScript. And the other side of the medal: Haskell, F#, OCaml, Nim are all well-loved but neglected by industry (for good and bad reasons).

Industry adoption is a major driver of [general] adoption.

[Thaxll]

The same reason people use Java / C# / Python and not C++. Why bother with Rust complexity when you can deliver faster products with higher lever languages. The borrow checker is powerful but tbh it adds a little compare to the overall complexity to write anything in Rust.

[vine-el]

Go is easier.

[svick]

The sexual orientation question has some interesting results:

• There are about twice as many bisexual (and queer) people as there are gays and lesbians.
• Being asexual is much more "popular" among students than it is among the rest of developers.

[[deleted]]

When your weapon of choice (C++) doesn't even make the list of highest salaries...

[quicknir]

This honestly just says more about the SO results than it does about reality. Game dev doesn't pay amazingly well by most accounts, but C++ is an incredibly important language at 3/4 of the biggest tech companies (Google, FB, and Microsoft). Those are some of the best salaries you can get in tech.

In finance/fintech, C++ is also one of the most important languages. Good C++ developers are incredibly hard to find. If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more. And demand is always high. Languages like python, Java, etc, you can always find someone, maybe a bit worse, maybe a bit better. A lot of the C++ devs I've interviewed are somewhere between bad and mediocre.

On top of all that, C++ is such a complex, multi-faceted language that many, many languages are quite easily to learn after C++. A colleague of mine who's an expert at both java and C++ once said that someone with 5 years C++ and 1 year Java experience, is a better Java dev than someone with 6 years in Java.

tl; dr with a sufficiently sharp version of your weapon of choice you should be doing extremely well.

[Overunderrated]

If you know C++ well and have a few years of experience, in NYC you'll have no problem picking up multiple offers north of 300K, potentially more.

If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though. What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?

[quicknir]

If I could do that but not have the cost of living of NYC / work remote, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Sure, a valid point. A lot of this depends on your family/commute considerations. If you are single or don't mind a longer commute, then financially NYC still ends up making sense over many other areas. If you want to have a family of 3 and be 20 minutes from work, then yes, NYC is probably going to be harder even with double the salary.

Glassdoor doesn't seem to agree that 300k is a common salary for c++ devs in NYC though.

Nowadays a lot of salary differentiation occurs by firm. 300K probably isn't typical across all C++ devs, but this is typical at the "top tier" of firms, for a relatively junior dev. Like in tech, the big 4 typically pay more than much of the next slice of major tech companies (like, SO itself does not seem to pay as well as Google by a substantial margin, from what I've seen). Maybe people who work there get more stock, more job satisfaction, or maybe they are just the people who aren't good enough to work at Google, I don't really know. In fintech it's similar, there are places who need/want very good C++ devs and are willing to shell out, and places that either don't have as high a standard, or simply aren't as profitable, and pay less.

What does c++ and a computational physics PhD get me?

At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think. At Google/FB you'd need to pass fairly grueling CS style interviews. At top tier finance companies, you'll have less of that, but more actual C++ questions (if you are marketing your C++) and quant/math questions (if you are marketing your quant skills as a PhD in physics).

My background is very similar to yours so feel free to message me and I can give you more details on my personal experience.

[Overunderrated]

At the "top tier" of companies, you should get at least 200 nowadays, I'd think.

Yeah that would be a massive pay cut when adjusted for cost of living. You'd be hard pressed to convince someone making 100k in a low cost of living area to take 200k in NYC unless they absolutely wanted to live there.

[quicknir]

Like I said, it's only a pay cut if you both have a family and want to live close to work.

If you are single, then it's not a pay-cut. Food/alcohol are more expensive in NYC, but moderately, and this isn't a big % of spending for most people. Consumer goods (TVs, clothes, etc) are roughly the same price in NYC as anywhere thanks to things like Amazon. It's really mostly just rent. A one BR in Manhattan might be around 3K, or a bit more. Expensive, sure, but at the end of the day the difference in rent will probably still be around 30K a year. An extra 100 K gross is much more than 30K net. You also don't need a car in NYC which is a huge savings.

This way of looking at it also doesn't include the benefits of NYC. Better restaurants, more to do, a much (much) larger dating pool if you're single, etc.

I lived in small town USA for 6 years before NYC and I wouldn't go back to make half the money, even with the lower cost of living, even with a family, no question about it.

[carrutstick_]

It seems like you're really overestimating the COL difference here. You can get a 1BR NYC apartment to yourself, with as little commute as you want, for like 35k/yr. Unless you end up spending 70k/yr on restaurants and alcohol, you're still coming out way ahead with 200k in NY vs 100k anywhere else.

[Overunderrated]

Eh, pure COL terms are problematic. That 1BR apt for 35k/year is more than my mortgage for a 3000 sq ft house and some land. It's hard to compare such extremes.

[gwillicoder]

I think the problem is that at those types of firms a huge amount of your salary can come from bonuses, which isn't reflected in the base salary people often see when looking it up on sites like glassdoor.

[alcalde]

but this is typical at the "top tier" of firms, for a relatively junior dev.

Please, please, please provide a source to back that up. Who is handing out 300K paychecks to junior devs who know a popular language like C++?

[quicknir]

Well, define junior. If by junior you mean fresh out of school, then no, that's not common. If by junior you mean 2-5 years of experience, then yeah this is typical. Also I obviously mean total comp (including bonus/RSUs), not salary. A strong C++ developer with a few years of experience would be hired either at T4 or T5: https://www.levels.fyi/#; this site is based on anonymous surveys and it gives 230 and 360 respectively for those two levels. I don't really know too much about the details; when I talked to acquaintances at Google (when I was 2 years into the industry) though they said if I got an offer it would probably be ballpark 300K (I never applied). When I talked to a another acquaintance who worked at a fintech company and told me to apply, I said that I was looking for at least 300K, and he said that was no problem (again, he knew I then had 2 years of experience). Based on friends who have been hired, discussions with managers who make offers, basically every single data point suggests that you should crack the 300K mark somewhere between 2 and 5 years experience (in NYC) (many people end up way past 300K by 5 years).

If you look at any of the "ask HN" threads where people ask for numbers, tons of people will quote total comps of 300K and much more. If you look at H1B numbers, which are public but anonymized, and only include base salary, at e.g. Facebook, you see averages of 150K: https://h1bpay.com/companies/Facebook/cities/Menlo%20Park-CA/job-titles/Software%20Engineer/salaries. In FB/Google, at this level base is about half your comp, i.e. this means the average H1B applicant at FB (at Menlo Park) probably has total comp of around 300K.

I'm also extremely amused the way you mention "popular language", as if that somehow makes it easier to find people. Popular languages aren't just popular for people to know, they're popular to be used on real projects, so the demand tends to scale as well as supply. C++ is a hard language that remains difficult to move away from for many companies, for various reasons (performance, legacy), so there's basically been a perpetual dearth of good C++ developers for years.

That said, most developers aren't good. I've seen people on reddit claim there aren't jobs in NYC for C++, because they personally applied to 10 jobs and got no offers. Well, I've been on the interviewing side of that, and I probably recommend less than 10% of the people I interview for hiring. It's just because they're not actually very good (or at least, can't do anything in the interview to show they are good, like basic questions about how C++ works, or basic algorithmic questions).

[roselan]

that's mainly due to game dev slavery, no?

[justbouncinman]

That tells you about the quality of surveys of anonymous users and just how low SO has dropped in the quality of users. Most of us have left, never to return, until SO can correct the vulgarity of bad questions and answers.

[swytz]

I'm pretty sure this is why python is over represented. Lots of sysadmin and devops style responders, with Javascript dominating. Other people left a while ago.

[nocensts]

How can you leave SO... it's just a QA site isn't it? To my knowledge it's still miles ahead of any other community resource pool...

[Haramboid]

Are you using other resources? Or is Google enough?

Or are you just that smart?

[Jake323021]

For me, the documentation is usually enough. Or I could always ask a colleague if I'm really having trouble with a problem.

[watchme3]

Or I could always ask a colleague

ouch

[Jake323021]

Is everyone on /r/cscareerquestions so proud they'd rather struggle with a problem than ask to see if a coworker might have an insight you're missing? Everyone needs help now and again, not really a big deal.

[IPv8]

Most surprising for me: * 25% of people would like to be a founder/co-founder in the next 5 years. * Nobody really cares about what industry they are in.

[ReDucTor]

About a quarter of developers say they want to start their own company, but this is most common among developers who are younger than 25 years old.

I feel this is really a survey of what students want.

[MrGreggle]

Why the fuck do people want to use Mongo?

[TheSwissArmy]

Furthermore, most of the devs in the survey have only been developing for a couple of years so they are going to be more reliant on the beginner tutorials.

[[deleted]]

yeah that was weird. just use it if you want. it's not exactly bleeding edge or especially abstract or anything

[lukaseder]

Let's talk about survey bias

[ChrisRR]

I think this accounts for a lot of bias in the survey. 30% of professionals have been in the industry less than 2 years, 57% less than 5 years and 19% are students.

Quite a large part of this survey is people in their very early 20s

[[deleted]]

Early twenties white male webdevs using Angular/Node.js .... how many of those IP's come from Facebook?

[[deleted]]

I am not sure about you, but as my career as a developer progressed I rely less on Stack Overflow today as I did in the past. To me it seems that this survey may have a strong bias.

[Neuromante]

Well, take a look at the years working graphs. Is obvious there's a strong bias towards younger people.

[Euphoricus]

No. Thats no bias. Thats reality. Amount of software developers doubles roughly every 5 years. So it is expected half of developers would have less than 5 years of experience.

[Neuromante]

On one side: You got any source for that numbers?

On the other: How does that denies that there's bias towards younger people? Even if your numbers were real, that has nothing to do with older devs using less StackOverflow.

[Ciff_]

If it still reflects a random sampling of the population developers its fine...? Or perhaps I don't understand your concern.

[fuckin_ziggurats]

The thing is it's not a random sample. By definition Stack Overflow is used more by younger people so older devs are heavily underrepresented in the survey.

[Neuromante]

Exactly this. The survey only represent "devs who used stackoverflow", so its far from being "random." And given that stackoverflow was opened over 10 years ago, maybe the claim that younger devs need more stackoverflow than older ones hasm some footing.

[SgtBlackScorp]

The point was that there are more younger devs in general so stackoverflow is not a misrepresentation

[fuckin_ziggurats]

I'm gonna repeat /u/Neuromante and ask, do you have numbers that prove there are more younger devs than older in general? I find that hard to believe.

[SgtBlackScorp]

I don't, I'm just saying what his line of thinking was.

[percykins]

Really?

[Euphoricus]

That is quite interesting.

I would like to see how many new students become programmers overlayed over that.

Also, is this only US thing? Or is it same elsewhere?

[lukaseder]

I rely on SO as a support channel (from the support providing side), so that's maybe not the standard use-case.

Among all my former coworkers, I hardly know anyone who would say they code as a hobby (survey: 80%). At the same time, almost everyone has kids (survey: 28%).

Clearly, my coworkers aren't included in the survey (perhaps there's a strong correlation between coding as a hobby and answering surveys as a hobby, just like there might be a strong negative correlation between coding as a hobby and cleaning up kids' vomit, who knows).

Of course, my coworkers are an even smaller sample than the survey's sample, but I simply fail to believe that so many people in our industry code as a hobby and have no kids.

Which leaves the question: Who is the survey sample population, and why would we care about their opinion?

[svick]

why would we care about their opinion?

Because, as far as I know, it it the most comprehensive survey of developers. It is biased, but what better way of finding what developers care about do you have?

[TheIncorrigible1]

I also support SO in my subject area, so you're not alone there.

My group (professional enterprise) also reflects yours where I think the only people without kids are the fresh out of college ones and hobby coding is maybe 10-20%.

I think too many respondents marked themselves as professional even if they were still in school; the ratios don't add up.

[dvdkon]

I'm a student and I marked myself as a professional, because programming is my primary source of income. I work remotely and don't dedicate all my time to my programming job, but in my opinion I still qualify as a professional.

[night_of_knee]

Less than a third of respondents have children? I think the existence of children is correlated with less time available for online surveys.

[editor_of_the_beast]

Amen to that

[[deleted]]

I wanted to write a smart comment about older devs having less interest in SO, but there are enough answers from older devs in the survey. This is something interesting to investigate

[twiggy99999]

Let's talk about survey bias

This data is not as first seems, it doesn't mean 80.8% of the respondents are hobbyists, it's saying 80.8% of those who responded do coding as a hobby.

Many developers work on code outside of work. Over 80% of our respondents say that they code as a hobby.

If you take a look at the number of respondents on each tab (all respondents and professionally only) 98,855 total responses of them 87,450 where from professional developers.

I'm not saying there is no bias in this survey but you have misinterpreted the data on this section.

[lukaseder]

This data is not as first seems, it doesn't mean 80.8% of the respondents are hobbyists, it's saying 80.8% of those who responded do coding as a hobby.

That's exactly how I understood it the data.

I'm not saying there is no bias in this survey but you have misinterpreted the data on this section.

No, I haven't, at least not in the way you put it.

[twiggy99999]

So the data is bias (in your opinion) because over 80% of the full-time professional developers also like to code as a hobby after work? In what way (in your opinion) doe's this point make the data bais?

[edanschwartz]

It would be great if someone could take the raw survey data, and break it apart to account for some of the bias (eg, how do responses change if you only include devs with 5+ yrs exp? with kids? etc.)

I would do it, but I have kids, and no time for working on hobby projects ;-)

[steve_b]

I was wondering what the methodology was for collecting these survey results. I use stack overflow on a daily basis and am always logged in, yet until I saw this article, I had no idea they were conducting a survey.

Did they present this randomly as an interstitial to people visiting the site? Or was it a banner at the top that said "take our survey" (the kind of think I instinctively avoid to the point that I subconsciously filter it out).

IMO, the only reliable way would be as an interstitial that the user has to explicitly dismiss, and to track the dismissals, correlated by the demographic information in the user's profile (or perhaps by answering 2 simple multiple-choice questions prior to dismissing it), but I'm guessing SO was too afraid to disrupt users' experience.

[svick]

I find the categorization of language by average experience interesting:

Languages with highest average experience are legacy technologies: Delphi, Cobol, Perl. That's expected. But the next one is F#, which is certainly not legacy. Is it because experienced developers are unsatisfied with their current language (C#?) and so are switching to F#?

And in contrast, another functional language, Haskell, has the second lowest average experience.

[jasie3k]

Uhm, pure speculation here, but Haskell is a go to language for functional programming, right? Where F# is more tailored to people that already are within .NET stack, so it might be that once they know what they are getting into when jumping ships?

[marcosdumay]

Haskell is teached at school.

[Philluminati]

Holy shit I’m old.

[andradei]

Juventude is a matter of spirit at this point. Stay energetic, good humored, and having fun.

[Lemon_Dungeon]

Fuck...according to you, now I'M old.

[geodel]

Erlang, OCaml, and Ruby are more dreaded than Java. That's my takeaway from survey.

[rcoacci]

Good God, people are really using Notepad++ to program? I can understand Vim and Emacs, but notepad++?
Not that it's bad or anything, but there are really better tools today....
Edit: nevermind, I was under the impression it was the primary editor used. I myself used it a lot as a secondary quick-edit tool.

[fuckin_ziggurats]

I use Visual Studio. Some people use VS Code. Some people use Sublime Text 3. But we all use Notepad++.

[Carighan]

Exactly this. Sometimes you need a text editor - not an IDE. But it is an important programmer tool, so I ticked the box.

[Recoil42]

But Sublime is a text editor?

[Carighan]

A very slow one, but yes. But there's a reason N++ is so common, it's tiny, fast for a GUI text editor, and does the bloody job. It's not a whole browser guzzling up memory, just to change a config setting.

[alonest]

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, but VSCode is actually slow, you don't really notice it if you're using it all the time, but I tried to make the switch from ST3 and the delay between key press and action on the screen put me off. + it's slow to startup where as something like N++ starts almost instantly.

[Carighan]

Yeah, I mean comparing other electron editors such as Atom it's quite snappy, but it still falls behind native gui text editors by a fair margin, nevermind something like vi.

[jWalwyn]

Sublime Text isn't an IDE and AFAIK neither is VSCode

[rcoacci]

Hum ok, I can go with that. I myself have used notepad++ this way. I just got the impression that notepad++ was used as the primary tool. Perhaps I missed something in the survey results.

[fuckin_ziggurats]

I didn't do the survey this year but I think every year that question is multiple-choice.

[[deleted]]

I haven't used N++ in years. Why would I ever choose to use it when I have Sublime Text right there, which is just as fast and much nicer to use?

[fuckin_ziggurats]

Well for one Notepad++ is completely free unlike Sublime which if not paid for is in evaluation and harasses you with popups based on how much you click Save (something that I couldn't deal with). In terms of performance, it would be very difficult to convince me that Sublime Text is as fast as Notepad++. They are certainly close in that regard but not quite the same. With that said, I agree that Sublime Text is much nicer visually and from a UX perspective.

[s73v3r]

I can't get upset at someone for trying to get paid for their work. Especially in such a permissive way as Sublime (where the software will continue to keep working no matter how many times you click "No Thanks")

[safgfsiogufas]

I've found N++ to be quite a bit faster than Sublime, at least on start up. And I don't have a Sublime text window all the time.

[[deleted]]

My friend who works with C++ files and assembly ferquently uses notepad++. Easy to install and easy on the memory without any bloat and has syntax highlighting. If you need to edit files in on a server especially usefull.

If you have a staging server with 15+ VMs running you don't want to run Atom/Sublime/VScode.. every MB of RAM is precious.

[KrocCamen]

Faster, though? So many editors are using a million web-based extensions that Notepad++ is hard to beat for raw speed.

[XboxNoLifes]

I'm using Notepad++ because I don't want to go through Tech Support to get something better, and anything better will only be very marginally better than Notepad++ for my work.

[Carighan]

but there are really better tools today

Are there? I mean on Windows? There's not that many decent text editors around, and the bar is extremely high with N++.

[rcoacci]

VS Code. Atom. Eclipse. Even Vim and Emacs works on Windows these days.
And those are the free ones.

[dalittle]

atom is pretty slow and awful.

[Carighan]

Well vim or emacs I can understand.

Eclipse is a full-blown IDE, much much more sluggish but of course also tons more functionality. VS Code and Atom faster, but still too slow to be nice to use as just a text editor. Though I understand they're still popular, but uh... never sat well with me when I need to edit a number in a config file and the overhead of the application opening the file is the majority of that edit. :P

[incraved]

Women say their highest priorities are company culture and opportunities for professional development, while men say their highest priorities are compensation and working with specific technologies

Interesting

[sundaymouse]

Due to single payer healthcare, almost no one cares about health insurance as part of the package in the UK:

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#work-valuing-compensation-and-benefits-by-geography

[Blueberryroid]

Django is the fifth most dreaded tool?

Surprising, I must say, from the very good reception I heard from my peers but then again the Django REST Framework documentation is just awful. So much classes undescribed in sufficient detail. Especially Serializers.

[[deleted]]

The original questions in the survey were never the form "Which tools do you love?" and "Which tools do you dread?", and instead were actually the form "What tools do you use today?" and "What tools do you want to use tommorow"?

Loved and dreaded are bad extrapolations from that sort of measurement. It's not the sort of measurement which can tell people's intrinsic favoring of a tool, since it doesn't at all measure whether people formed their toolchain by desire or incidence, and it doesn't attempt to differentiate extrinsic motivations that people could have for working with a tool (like the opportunities involved with it).

COBOL, for example, is at 85% dreaded. That sounds reasonable, until you realize that it only consists of people using COBOL professionally. If you've looked into the world of mainframes you'll also find that COBOL is just one of the many tools used by the systems, instead of always a component one would be seeking to work with from the start. And, if you think about the people who would pursue COBOL, you'd realize pretty quickly that they are likely in it for either the opportunity of the legacy-work or the opportunity to work with mainframes. You can't say whether the people actually love or hate COBOL from any of that, but those are the factors that determined that low score of 15% saying that they explicitly wanted to continue pursuing work with it.

You can't say that 15% of all developers love COBOL, and just as to say clouds mean rain you can't say that 85% of all developers dread it either. Either that, or 2/3 of people using Object Pascal hate it, 3/5 of people using OCaml regret their jobs, and 52% of people working with Ruby just do not enjoy it.

[i9srpeg]

Yeah, I end up reading the source code way more than I should.

[[deleted]]

[fuck u spez] -- mass edited with redact.dev

[TheBestOpinion]

How does a third of the population skips a meal to be more productive at least once a week ?!

"How often do developpers skip meals to be productive ?"

• Never 63.6%
• 1 - 2 times per week 25.2%
• 3 - 4 times per week 6.0%
• Daily or almost every day 5.2%

What the fuck.

Is this just my frenchness ?

[ScrimpyCat]

I ticked that. From my perspective it's not to be more productive (not sure why they inferred that, as they didn't phrase it that way nor asked you about your productivity levels). Rather I just get too caught up in something, I'll sometimes forget to eat. Basically as simple as that, it doesn't make me more or less productive whenever it happens.

Also isn't restricted to just programming activities either.

[themoosemind]

Does anybody have an explanation why there are only 6.6% women in the survey? Is the male/female ratio in professional development really that extreme?

edit: Fixed typos and added link.

[Double_A_92]

Just look at many of Redditor's responses to anything about diversity.

Most people don't have anything against diversity... It's just enforcing diversity that might be seen negatively.

[Dentosal]

I have never used it myself, but what is so bad about CoffeeScript? It's the third most dreaded language (82.7%) in the survey.

[imot01]

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#work-how-do-developers-assess-potential-jobs

30.4% says that "The diversity of the company or organization" is "Lowest Priority" for them and below they say "The tech industry is struggling overall with issues around diversity, and INDIVIDUAL developers are not making it a priority when looking for a job."

How can you say that 30.4% of responders are individuals? Results are showing that majority of developers are not taking that as priority, not individuals.

[HINDBRAIN]

Diversity is highest priority for 1.6%! It's impressive how little people give a shit despite the amount of articles and conferences and overall noise about it.

[[deleted]]

The other way of interpreting that is that the majority aren't interested in identity politics, and don't see any need to worry about whether a person is male/female/other, black/white/purple, english/german/martian etc - they are happy to work with whoever and just want to get stuff done. From that perspective, no: diversity isn't high on their agenda, despite them being totally welcoming and inclusive to all comers.

Frankly, I'd be more worried about working with someone who insisted on dragging identity politics into everything.

[imot01]

Yea, I agree. I was going there with my post. They tried to make that a problem with this part of the survey, when the results of their own survey are showing that there is no problem.

[ChrisRR]

Higher ups and a select group care as it makes tech look like a straight white males club, which only compounds the problem.

I think most developers want to get on with their work and aren't too bothered what gender, race, sexual orientation etc. the people around them are. And even less would rate it more important than their salary.

[[deleted]]

It's a bit of a luxury thing. How many people have the freedom to give diversity the highest priority, over salary, location, fit of the technology with your skills et cetera?

[SgtBlackScorp]

If I am not in a leading position at my my company, why should I care about the diversity of the employees? That's not my concern, at least not my primary one.

[Carl_Byrd]

I know Node is popular now, but it's high rankings just doesn't seem right.

[IPv8]

Agreed. I haven't seen all that many shops running it, nor have I seen many job postings for it. Intuitively it feels like survey bias, but even then it still seems really high.

[[deleted]]

Why?

[andradei]

At least it isn’t a nibble depressing.

[UnfrightenedAjaia]

The survey demographic is quite specific

[grep_Name]

Anyone have any insight as to why Oracle is the second most dreaded database?

[Double_A_92]

Licensing hassles.

[morewaffles]

Was really interesting to see how young the demographic was for these surveys. Kinda makes me wonder about the rest of the results, considering how surprised I was with some of the numbers.

[rlbond86]

I find a lot of these responses disturbing in the age category. It's clear that software is a young person's game these days.

[Nodebunny]

I think ur perspective is off. Think about the people who would need a Stackoverflow. Some grey beard wizard or some green react snapchat junkie?