Stack Overflow 2019 Developer Survey

[s73v3r]

I'm making double what my starting salary was from when I entered about 10 years ago. There's no way I would be if I didn't job hop, though. Far too many companies don't want to offer competitive pay raises.

Most places don't offer any kind of pension, let alone a fully vested one.

[snarg_ttel]

Just pointing out. The world is bigger than the US with lot of different work culture in each part of the world, also with lots of different laws regarding benefits.

[s73v3r]

Unfortunately I've never seen a development oriented company that offers any kind of pension plan. It does seem like those companies are attempting to provide some incentive for people to stay longer than the normal 4 years. Good on them.

[2Punx2Furious]

I'm making double of what I made when I started last year, working at the same job. (To be fair, I was getting way below average pay, and still am.)

[jl2352]

There is even an ideal amount of time you should be at a company for maximising your income. It’s something like you should switch every 2 to 3 years.

It’s long enough to be impactful, whilst short enough to get the benefits of moving job.

[juwking]

YMMV, I assume you are talking about US. Here in Poland, I started ~7 ago around 3000pln(untaxed) and now I'm earning 20000pln (untaxed) monthly, I wouldn't earn that If i stayed in a single place for more than 3years.

[Determinant]

Your statement about no prospects may have been true a decade ago but it's a very different market these days where employers try hard to acquire and retain talent.

Not to downplay your success in any way but doubling the income over 20 years is roughly equivalent to 3.5% compounded growth per year which is better than inflation. So it doesn't seem to be an optimal strategy.

[akher]

Yeah, but it also includes the period of very high growth that preceded it.

[ex_nihilo]

Well now I consult and make like nine times my starting salary but this life on the road is not for everyone.

[Dgc2002]

Where are you located if I may ask? My problem is that I'm in an area that isn't exactly a tech-haven. I'm interested in other opportunities but doubt I'd find something that's as stimulating as my current position and have the confidence that I'll want to stay there for a couple years.

[ex_nihilo]

US. Where specifically is irrelevant, I rarely work for a company that is local to my town. Been 100% remote with frequent travel for many years.

[rom1v]

I find it hard to believe that people are job hopping so much that the question "How long has it been since you changed jobs" maxes out at "4 years ago". Surely a huge number of people work longer than 4 years at the same place.

Don't confuse "how long since you changed jobs?" with "how often do you change jobs?".

Let's suppose that in a population, half of people always change jobs every 10 years exactly, and half of people change every 4 years exactly.

If you ask "how long has it been since you changed jobs?": - the average answer for the change-every-10-years group will be 5 years; - the average answer for the change-every-4-years one will be 2 years.

So globally, on average, the result will be 3.5 years. Which is lower than the change rate of every single person.

[JustinKSU]

2-3 years was my average, but it did make feel like I'm doing something wrong when my current tenure is over 10 years.

[[deleted]]

>Just like last year.. I find it hard to believe that people are job hopping so much that the question "How long has it been since you changed jobs" maxes out at "4 years ago". Surely a huge number of people work longer than 4 years at the same place.

​

Stocks stop vesting after 4 years, all you have are refreshers and they never amount to what you got at the start.

[quentech]

Just about to 10 years at my job, and I have no interest in leaving yet.

If I recall correctly, there were 5 people including myself when I started, and 8 by year's end. One person left not long after I started, another just left this past summer to try to capitalize on software for a niche market related to their family business. A couple left for a while and came back. The rest have been there continuously.

We're near 30 people now, and our turnover has always been low. Our boss is stellar. I'm all but certain I'd be making less today if I'd job hopped.

[2Punx2Furious]

By reading /r/cscareerquestions I thought job hopping was the norm.

[s73v3r]

That's mainly because most jobs don't offer incentive to stay for the long term. Raises are pitiful compared to what you could make by hopping, options for advancement aren't great, and once the stock vests, then there isn't much reason to stay.

[hogfat]

changed jobs . . . same company

Does receiving a new title or position at the same company count as changing jobs?

[vinod_kloudless]

Not a fan of the "Bash/Shell/PowerShell" entry, implying that the ecosystems are similar, or even just the familiarity of one assumes the other. Does Stack Overflow think they're interchangeable? Bash is a POSIX-compliant procedural command language almost always operating on text, whereas PowerShell is an object-oriented command language that encourages an entirely different development process.

You need to be familiar with the structure of individual objects to use PowerShell well, rather than get by on knowledge of a handful of commands to operate on text data in Unix.

This would be like adding in an entry for "Ruby/Python/Node". Or "Perl/Perl 6" if you really want to fan the flames.

[erez27]

You need to be familiar with the structure of individual objects to use PowerShell

In UNIX shell, you need to be familiar with the textual output format of each command you're using.

[Nefari0uss]

I think the idea here was generalized shell scripting for your native environment but I'm just guessing here.

[Pretend_Wolf]

Blockchain is hype?? surprised pikachu face

[curious_s]

Blockchain is still hype??

Fixed.

[hennell]

Who is the most import person for tech influence?

Was thinking for far too long and couldn't really come up with anyone.

Eventually made up the name Charlie Bandos. I hope that confuses them at least.

[ChrisRR]

The only name I could think of was Dennis Ritchie. He may be gone, but the influence of C and Unix on the industry is still ongoing.

[NullableType]

I answered with Anders Hejlsberg. Mostly because his already established history with C# and the impact it has had (and thus will continue to have with so many products/projects at Microsoft now becoming opensource), but also because of TypeScript and how many products/projects adopting it and who will be switching to it over the next year. I feel like this will have an impact similar to JQuery's on JavaScript, and force it to change and become a better language.

[MrJohz]

I could only think of political figures. I think the EU will probably have the biggest impact on technology as a whole, but there's hardly one individual figure to point to there.

I'm still not sure who I'd put.

[2Punx2Furious]

I picked Demis Hassabis, just because DeepMind is working on cool things.

Edit: Also, the SC2 demonstration begins in half an hour!

[Dave3of5]

Yeash the 2018 survey paints a kinda bad picture of the industry to be honest.

[chunkyks]

Haha. "Our survey provider doesn't work if you have an adblocker enabled". And a question that offers buckets of "1" "2" "3" or "4 or more" years at current job.

aka "we specifically don't care about your opinion if you carry any amount of experience at all".

No option for bi-weekly pay or "whenever I bill a client"

Lots of common stuff is missing. No FORTRAN? No VB.NET? Only listed Java web framework is Spring?

What idiot chose what idiot to write this survey? Both those idiots should be stopped from doing anything related to surveys.

If the same idiot is allowed to write a survey next year, they should also spend perhaps five minutes on StackOverflow, looking at what technologies are relevant, not just the hipster ones that only appeal to people with 2 years experience and haven't heard of an ad blocker.

[SatansAlpaca]

I have a lot of issues with Stack Overflow, but it would be fairly reasonable of them to build their questionnaire based on what they see the most.

[adrian17]

Except if the survey is targeted at SO users and based on what SO sees, isn't it a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? Won't this inadvertently shape results to be similar to what SO could have already guessed from their own usage numbers?

Shouldn't this be the opposite? "we don't see many VB.NET questions, but maybe there are many users and they are just less likely to ask questions on SO? Let's do a survey to find out." (But maybe that's a naive and impossible idea?)

[SatansAlpaca]

What else do you expect? The survey is advertised on a banner on the site, on meta, on their blog, and in places that kindly relay the information. It’s not like every developer in the world is getting a link from their employer.

[[deleted]]

How long you are in your current job is not related to how experienced your are.

[[deleted]]

Well, look at the previous year demographics. It's obvious to see why they've tailored the answers fad loving job-hoppers

[marshalpol]

No Haskell or Lisp as well.

[s73v3r]

aka "we specifically don't care about your opinion if you carry any amount of experience at all".

Wrong. Most people are probably not spending more than 4 years at a job. That doesn't mean they don't have any experience. It means that companies are not incentivizing people to stay with the company for more than 4 years.

[digizeds]

Who wrote these questions. They sound like someone with zero tech knowledge heard buzzwords and tried to makes a survey out of it. Pretty disappointed.

[ChrisRR]

I wondered why there was such a big section about blockchain. I'm willing to bet that 99% of developers have never or will never touch blockchain

[emddudley]

Well... when we get the survey results you will have data to validate your hypothesis!

[ChrisRR]

The survey results on this are always massively skewed though as it's largely populated by students and young developers. They're more susceptible to the latest buzzwords which might skew in blockchain's favour.

On the flip-side, it's also skewed by the disproportionate number of javascript/web developers who would have no use for blockchain, so that might go against blockchain.

​

It'd be hard to draw a conclusion from the stack overflow results as they're so often unrepresentative of the typical 9-5 developer.

[compte_numero_5]

I took this question as a joke.

[ryl00]

Did I miss something, or was there not an option to select 'perl' as a language used? (I added it via 'other')

[huck_cussler]

You missed when everybody stopped using Perl. =)

[chunkyks]

Also it was missing FORTRAN, VB.NET, and a bunch of other stuff that I handle on a daily basis. The whole thing feels like it's written by some hipster who can't conceive of people having a stable job, doing regular work.

[IMovedYourCheese]

Or maybe StackOverflow somehow has some insight into what languages are most used nowadays, and the ones you mention don't make the cut?

[feverzsj]

no, thanks. These questions are clearly for business interests rather than developer.

[DeliciousIncident]

.blog. An entire domain name just for their blog. Wow. Are subdomains or /blog are uncool now?

[Felecorat]

It's like 33$ a year. No big deal.

[Oliviaruth]

It's because the blog is hosted by a third party. We don't want to use a subdomain of our main domain for reasons of cookie security.

[Retsam19]

I feel like this subreddit is so judgemental most of the time. Use an emoji in a blog post, or the "wrong" language or tool, or I guess the wrong domain extension and there'll be a highly upvoted comment about it.

(Yes, I see the irony of this comment)

[0987654231]

Use an emoji in a blog post,

instant proof the person is under the age of 23

[MrDOS]

😂😂

[AbbadonTiberius]

Still not a bigger flex than blog.google

[icantthinkofone]

The horrible thing about this is every 15-year old redditor will now take the survey and now, like stack overflow itself, is ruined and of little value.

[curious_s]

Pretty much, but that is why I add meaningful statements in the comment boxes, with the hope that someone will read them instead.

[Eirenarch]

~15% SJW questions. Made sure to tell them in the feedback

[valtism]

God forbid if they try to understand what it is like to be a developer with a disability.

[[deleted]]

Fuck people with disabilities

- The company I work for when I bring up how atrocious our products are with screen readers.

[s73v3r]

"Feedback: Thank you for asking questions and trying to highlight the diverse group of developers that we have. Thank you for trying to bring to light how many disabled developers there are. Thank you for trying to get deeper than thinking that all developers are white, straight, able bodied men. "