What are your observations from SO Developer Survey 2019? What did you find interesting or odd? Let's point them out and discuss.

insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019

Mark's photo

Rust is on top again! It's a very innovative and well-thought-out language, so I think it's well-deserved.

Screenshot from 2019-04-09 21-59-38.png

I'm generally happy with the top several. I wish it were what we do as an industry, rather than what we would like to do.

Fazle Rahman's photo

co-founder & ceo @ Hashnode

30% of developers who took the survey got inspired by Elon Musk 🔥😖

D3uzm7vX4AEOgEL.png

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Indu Pillai's photo

2.2% got inspired by Donald Trump.

Gustavo Benedito Costa's photo

I do not get inspired by any of them. I do not whorship/idolize anyone because I am an anti-elitist. Except Linus Torvard, all they are fake geniuses and fake philanthropists. Elon Musk hates the poor people and the minorities.

Deactivated User's photo

I'm surprised by how unloved Ruby is, and how it's 7th most dreaded. Same with Rails, very little love, 3rd on dreaded. At least Ruby is still one of the best paying languages.

Also surprised that MongoDB is the most wanted database technology. Feels like I'm missing something.

Also seeing Heroku 3rd on dreaded feels odd.

Kinda shocked to see whiteboard coding used in almost a third of interviews, it's pretty sad. Same with the 20% brain teaser puzzle.

SRE salary is kinda nutty. I wonder if they inflate the Golang salaries too.

Mark's photo

Yeah me too, I knew Ruby wasn't that big or growing, but I thought there was a sizable group who likes it a lot, and nobody else cares enough to dread it...

Mongo being popular does match my observations. I don't personally like it, but it does seem very popular.

Indu Pillai's photo

I'd put Ruby and Elixir at the top.

Vijay Thirugnanam's photo

React | C++ | Python developer

I found the stats on Blockchain interesting.

Screenshot 2019-04-10 at 6.34.40 AM.jpg

  1. 80% of developers don't use it at all.
  2. 15% think it is fad.
  3. 15% think it is an overuse of resources

Can't agree more

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Mario Giambanco's photo

There was an article the other day on China considering banning block chain "mining" because it's a complete waste of electricity

reuters.com/article/us-china-cryptocurrenc…

Vijay Thirugnanam's photo

Mark there are lot of developers who don't have skin in the game :) - who just develop tech to enhance their resume ...

Mark's photo

React is the best framework, nobody needs to ask again for the remainder of 2019

Screenshot from 2019-04-09 22-04-29.png

Comparing jQuery to Laravel is apples to oranges at best though...

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Mark's photo

Trent Haynes But there is no objective best one so I guess the whole question of "react vs vue vs angular vs vanilla" doesn't make sense... But let's pretend this is the answer so people stop asking.

Trent Haynes's photo

I actually believe that sometimes, there is a best choice for the task at hand. I think that's why the ranking is "loved", not "best". Otherwise it devolves into a religious discussion.

Sky's photo

To be honest it looks more of fanboyish survey. What we do in industry and what is in the survey results is lot different. Nobody uses Rust for their blog, web app and desktop apps. So these are just developer wishes in the surveys.

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Mark's photo

Sky It's just called having a preferred language? There's no blind obsession or over-excitement or pushing, it's just what people would like to use if they could. That's not what "fanboy" means.

You bring up industry demand again, but I don't understand the connection. Why is it bad that "most loved" does not match "most used"? Yes, there is a disconnect between what developers would like to use, and what they get to use. Both are reported.

Sky's photo

I think there is blind obsession, that's why people push titles such as "ruby will overtake python, rust will replace node, php will die in 2020". When such surveys lead to such world view it sure sounds like fanboyish edgy perspective.

Mark's photo

And one last one to end on a sad note

Screenshot from 2019-04-09 22-32-38.png

My workplace is slightly above average though, so good news there.

Kevin Woblick's photo

Creator of Cloudhiker, LinkAce, Game-Quotes.com and more

For me hardly any statistics are really helpful. As long as SO does not allow to view results per country or region it's more like "well.. okay, the rest of the world thinks this way". Would be more interesting to get insights for Germany or the EU alone. Also, to be honest, there's not much which changed completely in comparison with last year.

Mark's photo

There are a few questions that are split up per region if you're interested. Many are not though, I guess they didn't have enough data or see enough value.

Girish Patil's photo

Full-stack engineer

Love the Vue vs React ❤ and WebAssembly reaching top.

Pavan Belagatti's photo

Developer Advocate

DevOps specialists and SREs are among the highest paid, most experienced developers most satisfied with their jobs. Is it true?

Fazle Rahman's photo

Yes, I would want to believe that. 😀

Sanjay Ojha's photo

Definitely a bad sign for PHP and its Eco-system

Mark's photo

It's been decreasing for a while

php.PNG

Mario Giambanco's photo

I guess it's all a matter of who you ask

w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programm…

A survey vs actual statistical numbers of the top 10 mil websites ranked by Alexa

And why does it matter anyway? This "my programming language is better than yours" argument is really getting old.

I think PHP is still a very strong backend language to use.

Mark's photo

Open source software is of equal or better quality than closed source software (this is my experience as well)

Screenshot from 2019-04-09 22-26-46.png

Bridget Sarah's photo

Full Stack Mobile App Developer

I read this earlier this morning and had to reflect on this before writing. I do believe it has given us very insightful results of our industry and where its going. I wouldn't stick to these results as I would highly suggest by ten years time that the market will be reversed in quite a bit detailing these results.

What we know at the moment is that a lot more younger children are starting to code, and given five years time, there will be a lot more of us mid-level to senior developers and a new generation of coders that will more than likely beat us at our own game to some degree.

With the gender being female, I am increasing seeing that there are more women going into more technical roles, which hopefully will balance out the market.

Now what was interesting to see was where MySQL is standing, despite PHP has fallen quite behind int he market MySQL is still standing quite firmly.

Platform being Linux chosen over Windows and Mac for developers, that quite surprising! Maybe we are all fed-up with Apples costly macs that no one can afford ;)

Most Dreaded Platforms: WordPress - :D I predicted this exactly last year :)

Thamaraiselvam's photo

Lead Consultant at ThoughtWorks

Linux 53.3%