The Developer Economics Survey runs twice every year, reaching out to all types of developers, from curious weekend hobbyists to enterprise & professional devs with years of coding experience, and to students in need to sharpen their skills. Our vision is to help developers become not only better at coding but offer the necessary resources to enhance their developer skills & make smarter business decisions. In our survey participation, we strive for diversity, including developers from around the world and from all development areas.
Another Developer Economics Survey came to an end on the 13th of August.
The Developer Economics Q2 2019 Survey ran from the 19th of June and once again it has been very exciting, fun and nerve racking! During this period, developers from all over the world, with various backgrounds had their voices heard. Here are some survey fast facts:
- We ran for 9 weeks
- Covered 9 languages (English, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese Simplified & Traditional, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and Russian) and
- 9 areas of development (Web, Mobile, Desktop, Cloud, AR/VR, IoT, Games, Machine Learning and Data Science)
- Communicated internally through 9 different Slack channels on survey updates & alerts
- Realised that 9 is our lucky number
- Reached 179 countries
- We read through more than 5,100 feedback comments (still answering these)
- We received 3 comments requesting more kittens and 5 comments requesting more beer (both suggestions are now in the backlog).
We use our Developer Economics survey as an opportunity to give back to the developer community.
For each completed response to the Developer Economics Survey, we donate a small amount of money to the Raspberry Pi Foundation which supports young coders in the making. The idea is simple – the more responses we get, the more money we’ll donate. So, in essence, developers who participate are the ones who contribute in giving back to the community. We try to support different organizations in each survey wave. We welcome input from our respondents, so feel free to share any non profit organizations that support the developer community, in the comments below.
The Developer Economics community is also about fun and games, making it worthwhile for devs to invest time to take and promote the survey. In each survey wave we have prize draws and a very engaging referral program. We try to cover all tastes and always include licences and courses so developers can use rewards to improve their skills. All developers who provide their contact details are eligible to enter the draws. How do we select prizes? We research, ask for our own teams’ developers input, and we always take into account the feedback provided by previous survey winners. Here is what we had for you during the Q2 2019 DE survey:
OnePlus 6T
Microsoft Surface Pro
Oculus Rift S
Amazon Gift cards
Coding courses
Programming tools
And many more in our full list
There are extra prizes for those who complete additional questions in their area of expertise. In this way, the more responses you provide the more chances you have to win! Developers who take the survey are notified for these extra prizes and get to choose the prize they would prefer to win.
Our referral program includes developers from all over the world supporting us to reach as many developers from their communities as possible, and in return, they can win awesome cash prizes if they make it to the top of the leaderboard. Everyone who made it to the Top 50 won cash and the amazing referrer who made it to the top won $1,000 USD. But irrespective of whether you won or not, from all of us on the Developer Economics Team, thank you! You have contributed in the best possible way in helping developers understand the world and the world understand developers – which is our goal and what keeps us going.
After the survey closes and the data is crunched, we provide the survey participants with early access to key findings. These come via our State of the Developer Nation (SoN) Report and the Developer Benchmarks Graphs. Here you can download the previous SoN report – 16th edition- while waiting for the next one to be published in a few weeks’ time. You can find the Developer Benchmark graphs here to make sure you know your industry & stay competitive.
What more is there for those who participate? Here is what they have shared with us:
“Thanks for the nice survey. This time, not only I answered some interesting questions, but also learned something new on software products and technologies. Well done!”
“I think this is a good survey, I also noticed some technologies I didn’t know existed. However it was very interesting filling this survey.”
“Like the last Developer Economics Survey, this one helped me think that I have a lot to learn and also how I can do it, like what I have to do to achieve my goals. So thank you one more time. Looking forward to next DE survey.”
One of the most interesting parts of our surveys is the feedback we get from respondents. Our team always takes time to read the suggestions provided. Some of them were related to the duration of the survey, others highlighted areas we didn’t cover extensively. We take into account all feedback provided and do our best to include all areas and topics while not increasing the survey duration by much, as we realise it is already quite lengthy. If of interest, we have put together a blogpost with the most fun & interesting survey feedback we received. Enjoy it here.
From all of us in the Developer Economics Team, thank you for being a part of this journey! If this was your first time taking one of our surveys, thank you for joining us. In case you haven’t done so already, you can join our community here. Together we are creating the foundations of a world that is friendlier to developers.
Watch out for the prize draw results, the announcement of the winners, and the reports published in the following days featuring the latest trends & insights.
We hope to see you again in a future Developer Economics Survey!