We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly.
I'm not so sure about this conclusion. I feel that below-average developers are less likely to answer stack overflow surveys at all. In my anecdotal experience, below-average devs usually have little interest in interacting with the overall "developer community" or reading about development more than the absolute minimum needed to finish their assigned tasks.
That was my takeaway as well. It’s also somewhat ambiguous; who are you comparing yourself to? All coworkers, everyone in your graduating class, people the same age as you?
I’m sure that we’re seeing at least a bit of everyone thinking they’re more skilled than they are, but it’s more slight than that caption would lead you to believe.
Will People Born Today Have a Better Life Than Their Parents?
> Respondents in China are the most optimistic, and those in regions like Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East are especially hopeful compared to those in Western Europe. This is especially notable in countries like France and Germany, which are the 4th and 7th largest economies in the world, respectively.
It makes sense that more developed countries would have lower optimism. If the previous generation already had a decent quality-of-life, there's less reason to assume that the next generation will have it even better. Developing countries are more likely to have significant recent salient difficulties that the next generation will no longer have.
> If the previous generation already had a decent quality-of-life, there's less reason to assume that the next generation will have it even better.
I do agree that the rate of improvement may be lower for already highly developed countries. And that the difficulties solved in developing countries may have a much larger positive impact then small steps in more developed countries.
But there's no artificial upper limit to quality-of-life. You wont hit a barrier and be forced to stagnate and go down: there's so many issues in today's societies that need solving.
I think I'm about to go into the offer phase with a company. I've already been told by the recruiter that the salary is 80k. Looking at the Python results, I'm honestly thinking about sending them this dev survey. Like, "just so we're clear, you are intentionally underpaying?"
It doesn’t work like that. There are so many variables that go into compensation like experience and location that you can’t really look at the average for an entire country across all experience levels.
Maybe because the backend is getting dumber and dumber (micro/nano services) while the frontend is getting more complex (SPAs, almost like desktops apps).
And I say this as a backend developer who makes these dumb backends that are little more than a glorified layer over postgres.
And what would the Phase 2 of your pointless FUD be? You do realize that LSP was created by Microsoft, right? And it's pretty much the standard for language and editor integration right now.
Bittersweet to see how much “distracting work environment” is reported to reduce productivity, given that companies abjectly refuse to provide private & quiet workspaces despite it being unequivocally cost effective to do so even for most start-ups in dense urban centers.
I continue to find the discussion of salary disappointing though. The survey provides a good opportunity for more detailed information.
People selling stuff (to clients, to investors) think having a big open room full of developers using computers is impressive enough to help them sell. The developer zoo.
A normal professional office with hallways and doors doesn't look that impressive, or might but only if dedicated lobby and (client) meeting areas have had some real money & space dedicated to them.
In recent consulting scenarios, the clients seemed to feel that leaving developers alone in quiet areas was preferred. Though they had a direct connection to the software being built for their needs compared to someone who is looking to be woo'd & awed.
It is probably worth pointing out that this survey is very web/mobile developer centric. If you surveyed systems/core developers -- the people who designed/wrote many of the tools used by developers in this survey -- the survey results would distribute quite differently.
Laughably so...I once spoke to a software engineer that wrote systems for fighter jets and I didn't recognize any terms or acronyms of any tech he used on a daily basis.
Presumably, the people who fill out the survey are a very specific cross-section of the industry. Those who use a BSD are much less likely to answer a SO survey than a survey from a site with more BSD users, which makes it virtually impossible to get reasonable data.
Why would that be? Stackoverflow is pretty broad forum and have BSD questions and answers as well. In opinion it's that BSD is very rarely used by people. Linux is doing majority of work better than BSD so it's required only by very small part of the market.
"Over half of respondents had written their first line of code by the time they were sixteen, although this experience varies by country and by gender."
This really surprises me. Is it that common to take programming classes in high school? I suppose nowadays it is, but can anyone else confirm that was the case 10-20 years ago?
In my experience, virtually all people who learned programming as children were self-taught. This was definitely the case 10-20 years ago and I don't think it has declined that much.
Maybe this is an American perspective, but I was surprised that anyone would assume children are primarily learning programming in classes. Even today, I know several elementary school children who have programming as a hobby -- they are learning on their own using the Internet for the most part.
I went to a magnet middle school in small town south GA in 1988 where we had an Applesoft Basic programming course. All of the public high schools also had elective Basic courses while I was in school.
From the best I can tell, teaching programming in was a thing in the mid 80s to mid 90s and then declined
I did not take any programming classes in high school. BUT...
My first code was at around age 7 (in the mid-1980s). I found a computer (Commodore 64, including manual) in a very rural area off the side of a road where some people dumped trash. And at school, I got invited into a special program starting around second grade, that included doing some projects in BASIC. But then I didn't really do any coding in high school. But then I majored in Computer Science. But then I dropped out...
All that is to say, at least in my low-cost-of-living area, we had this weird dichotomy where a few special snowflakes got to learn programming in primary school, but then our high school didn't offer any programming classes at all!
I was tinkering around with BASIC on any computer I could get my hands on. (Found it installed on my mum's old 80286 and on the old Dells lining my rural school's labs). That would have been in the early/mid 90's-2000's
I learned how to program on my grandparents' C64 as a wee lad nearly 30 years ago and haven't gotten away from keyboards since. I learned more on my own than I ever did in school.
I had a C++ class in high school where I felt like I really learned nothing. I never wrote anything more complex than input and print statements. I spent the entire class reading other stuff and playing videogames. It was unsupervised and learn-at-your-own-pace, so everyone could do whatever they wanted so long as you turned in a final assignment. Mine was just inputs and print statements.
I technically wrote my first line of code in that class, but I didn't actually start programming until nearly a decade later IMO.
I graduated high school in 1995, so 24 years ago. I was taking programming classes in high school.
My first programming classes were actually offered in elementary school during 4th grade, but that was only offered to "advanced" students and not part of general education. Still, that would have been about 32 years ago.
My first real programming class was in 9th grade, 1997. That class was around for a while. The language was BASIC, but covered all CS topics (if then, loops, disk i/o...and even GOTO hah!).
My middle school had computers with rudimentary programming but I wouldn't consider it a real programming class.
I took programming classes in elementary school 20 years ago. It wasn’t officially a programming class but we didn’t really need 8 years of school to learn how to type and use spreadsheets so eventually anyone who was ahead of the curve was taught programming even if it was something as simple as Visual Basic.
I started programming at 15 after getting into custom WarCraft III maps, went from a GUI Interface to JASS (WC3's scripting language) and finally started using C to make my own small mini-games, I imagine it's not an uncommon path among young people that want to be game developers.
At the very least, you don’t (and didn’t) need to take classes to learn to program. Cprogramming.com and the Java trails were what I started with. (And lots of books from Barnes & Noble.)
I found it quite surprising that Azure is the least used and most dreaded cloud of the three major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) among all respondents, despite Stack Overflow being heavily C# and .NET biased.
SO was heavily C# & .NET biased in its earlier years. I'm not sure that is still the case in platform usage. Also not sure if that's the case on this survey as C# was just barely above PHP & was less than half of JS in terms of respondents. JavaScript, Python & Java were all higher.
SO has a somewhat "niche" audience- most of the MS stack has a single source of truth about documentation (and it's detailed). People using MS stack are also the people using MS SQL Server.
Btw, do you know if the MS SQL server perf analysis tools are available for linux?
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#developer-pro...