Tag: developers

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Community

A Saga of Programming Languages: 2022 Update

The choice of programming language matters deeply to developers because they want to keep their skills up-to-date and marketable. Programming Languages are a beloved subject of debate and the kernels of some of the strongest developer communities. They matter to toolmakers too, because they want to make sure they provide the most useful SDKs.

It can be hard to assess how widely used a programming language is. The indices available from players like Tiobe, Redmonk, Stack Overflow’s yearly survey, or GitHub’s State of the Octoverse are great, but offer mostly relative comparisons between languages, providing no sense of the absolute size of each community. They may also be biased geographically or skewed towards certain fields of software development or open-source developers. 

The estimates we present here look at active software developers using each programming language; across the globe and all kinds of programmers. They are based on two pieces of data. First is our independent estimate of the global number of software developers, which we published for the first time in 2017. We estimate that, as of Q3 2022, there are 33.6 million active software developers worldwide. 

Second is our large-scale, low-bias surveys which reach tens of thousands of developers every six months. In these surveys, we have consistently asked developers about their use of programming languages across 13 areas of development, giving us rich and reliable information about who uses each language and in which context.

size of of programming language communities in Q3 2022

JavaScript continues to be the largest language community

JavaScript remains the most popular programming language for the 11th survey in a row, with over 19.5M developers worldwide using it. Notably, the JavaScript community has been growing in size consistently for the past several years. Between Q3 2020 and Q3 2022, Javascript experienced a 59% increase as 7.3M developers joined the community – one of the highest growths in absolute terms across programming languages. Not only do new developers see it as an attractive entry-level language, but existing ones are also adding it to their skillset. JavaScript’s popularity extends across all sectors, with at least a quarter of developers in every sector using it.

Developers joined the JavaScript community in the last two years

In 2020, Python overtook Java as the second most widely used language and now counts nearly 17M developers in its community. Python has continued to show strong growth, having added about 8M net new developers over the last two years. The rise of data science and machine learning (ML) is a clear factor in Python’s growing popularity. To put this into perspective, about 63% of ML developers and data scientists report using Python. In comparison, less than 15% use R, the other language often associated with data science.

Java is one of the most important general-purpose languages and the cornerstone of the Android app ecosystem. Although it has been around for over two decades, it continues to experience strong growth. In the last two years, Java has almost doubled the size of its community, from 8.3M to 16.5M. For perspective, the global developer population grew about half as fast over the same period. Within the last year alone, Java has added 6.3M developers, the largest absolute growth of any language community. Our data suggest that Java’s growth is supported not only by the usual suspects, i.e. backend and mobile development but also by its rising adoption in AR/VR projects, likely due to Android’s popularity as an AV/VR platform. 

The group of major, well-established programming languages is completed with C/C++ (12.3M), C# (10.6M), and PHP (8.9M). PHP has seen the slowest growth rate of all languages over the last year, growing just 22%, adding 1.6M net new developers. PHP is a common choice for cloud and web developers but has seen decreasing popularity, particularly amongst web developers where it has gone from the second most popular language in Q3 2021 behind JavaScript, to the fourth most popular in Q3 2022, with Python and Java becoming more popular choices.

C and C++ are core languages in embedded and IoT projects, for both on-device and application-level coding, but also in mobile and desktop development, which are sectors that attract 17.7M and 15.6M developers respectively. C#, on the other hand, has maintained its popularity among multiple different areas of software development, particularly among desktop and game developers. C/C++ added 4.3M net new developers in the last year and C# added 2.8M over the same period.

Rust and Kotlin continue their rise in popularity

We have previously identified Rust and Kotlin as two of the fastest-growing language communities and this continues to be the case. Rust has more than tripled in size in the past two years, from just 0.8M developers in Q3 2020 to 2.8M in Q3 2022. Rust has added 0.7M developers in the last six months alone and is close to overtaking Objective C to become the 11th largest language community. Rust has formed a strong community of developers who care about performance, memory safety, and security. As a result, it has seen increased adoption in IoT software projects, but also in desktop and game development, where Rust is desired for its ability to build fast and scalable projects.

Kotlin has also seen a large growth in the last two years, more than doubling in size from 2.3M in Q3 2020 to 6.1M in Q3 2022. As such, it went from the ninth to the seventh largest language community during this time, overtaking Swift and those using visual development tools. This growth can largely be attributed to Google’s decision in 2019 to make Kotlin its preferred language for Android development it is currently used by a fifth of mobile developers and is the second most popular language for mobile development. Despite Google’s preference for Kotlin, the inertia of Java means that, after three years, it is still the most popular language for mobile development.

Swift currently counts 4.2M developers and is the default language for development across all Apple platforms. This has led to a phase-out of Objective C (3M) from the Apple app ecosystem. However, Objective C has maintained its place among IoT developers and increasing adoption for on-device code, and AR/VR developers, leading to a similar increase in the number of Swift and Objective C developers in the last two years; 1.8M and 1.6M respectively.

The more niche languages – Go, Ruby, Dart, and Lua – are still much smaller, with less than 4M active developers each. Go and Ruby are important languages in backend development, but Go is the third fastest-growing language community and has added more than twice as many developers as Ruby in the last two years; 2.3M and 1.0M new developers, respectively. This is likely due to the fast development cycle it offers even though it is a compiled language.

Dart has seen steady growth in the last two years, predominantly due to the increasing adoption of the Flutter framework in mobile development, with 13% of mobile developers currently using Google’s language. Finally, Lua is among the fastest-growing language communities, mainly drawing in IoT, game, and AR/VR developers looking for a scripting alternative to low-level programming languages such as C and C++.

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Tips

Are you an enterprise developer?

We often come across the term “Enterprise Developers” and even more often, we ask ourselves questions about their profile, from basic demographics to purchasing decisions. But who is an Enterprise Developer? According to SlashData, large enterprise developers as those who work for organisations with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees and very large enterprise developers as those who work for organisations with more than 5,000 employees. Non-enterprise developers are those that remain.

How many enterprise developers are out there?

In Q1 2021, SlashData estimated that there are 1.5M enterprise developers working in large organisations, and 2.0M working in very large enterprises. Between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, there was a 21% year-on-year growth in the large enterprise population, while the very large enterprise population increased by 18%. This is impressive growth, considering that the non-enterprise population showed only 10% growth over the same period. However, for the large and very large enterprise population, the immediate picture is one of stability: in the last six months, it has remained practically unchanged. Considering that the biggest tech companies an important proportion of very large enterprises have benefited from the economic situation caused by the pandemic, it is somewhat of a surprise that the very large enterprise population hasn’t increased. Perhaps there is a backlog of hiring splurges that have yet to show up in the data or these companies are remaining cautious and waiting to see how the pandemic plays out before committing to hiring more employees.

Where in the world are they located?

If we break down the enterprise populations by region, we find that 22% of software developers in South Asia are very large enterprise developers. These enterprises are likely using their global connections to capitalise on price here: the median per-hour cost for Android development in India, a large hub for app development, is $30. In North America, the rate is five times as high. For example, SAP, the largest non-American software company by revenue, has based its largest R&D lab outside Germany, in India. In absolute terms, most developers working at very large enterprises are to be found in North America (27%) and Western Europe (26%). South Asia takes third place, with 17% of all very large enterprise developers working in this region. North America, Western Europe, and East Asia are the stage for large enterprises, with 28%, 24%, and 17% of the large enterprise population respectively.

Which sectors or industries are they working on?

Most developers are involved in web apps: more than 6 out of 10 developers are involved in the sector. However, developers are often involved in more than one sector. In fact, around three-quarters of developers are involved in more than two sectors, while around 15% engage in five or more sectors. Besides web apps, enterprise developers are dominated by their involvement in the backend sector: 56% of very large enterprise developers and 51% of large enterprise developers
work in this sector. This is compared to the 45% of non-enterprise developers who work in the backend sector. Enterprise businesses typically have more sophisticated needs that warrant engaging backend developers. With the myriad of resources at their disposal, enterprises are more easily able to develop large-scale, connected products with complicated backends, IoT devices, for example. Backend developers are required to achieve these goals.

The opposite trend is observed in mobile apps: 40% of non-enterprise
developers work in this field, while just under a third of enterprise developers do. The relatively short scope and scale of mobile app development make small business engagement in this sector achievable. For enterprise companies a mobile app, or a web app, is only one small part of a giant machine of software; but for smaller
organisations, the mobile or web app might be the entire product. Web apps, backend services, and desktop apps the top three sectors enterprise developers are involved should be explored in greater detail.

Attitudes and engagement

Open source has become a ubiquitous part of developer culture, embodying the widely venerated values of sharing code, knowledge, and best practices among peer developers. These days, many open source projects are vendor or corporate owned and maintained. Developer attitudes towards contributing to these open source projects differ, but across the non-enterprise/large enterprise/very large
enterprise divide these differences are subtle. Large enterprise developers are slightly more likely to contribute to corporate-owned, open source to improve their positions in the software food chain: 17% are motivated by their desire to get noticed by the company.
Meanwhile, very large enterprises are slightly more likely to
have developers buy into the company ethos: 20% of developers working at these organisations wish to contribute to something that has the company’s backing to succeed.

Non-enterprise developers tend to favour reasons relating to improving their skill set: 47% wish to learn to code better. Compare this to large enterprise developers, of whom 42% are motivated by learning to code better. Around one-fifth of all developers are united by the desire to build community support; while just under a third of all developers advocate for a more open software society, contributing to corporate-owned, open-source projects because it’s “something bigger than me”. However, moving from attitudes to economic engagement, the differences between large, very large, and non-enterprise developers tend to be more pronounced regarding practical engagement within an organisation.

“Those who control the money”

There are many tiers of enterprise developers: these range from those high up in a business hierarchy that makes or influences purchasing decisions, down to developers who are not involved at all in these selections. The breakdown of developers according to economic decision-making power within an organisation differs across the non-enterprise/large enterprise/very large enterprise divide.

Just over a quarter of large enterprise (27%) and non-enterprise developers (26%) are economic decision makers for their team or company, with the ability to make the final
selection decision for tools, approve expenses on tools and components, and/or approve the overall team budget for tools. Not all of these economic decision-makers can approve budgets or expenses, but whether they are decision-makers for their team or company, they are all empowered to make tool selection decisions.

Comparing these segments to very large enterprises, where only 18% of developers can make purchasing decisions, demonstrates that decision-making power tends to concentrate at the top of the hierarchy in larger organisations. In agreement with this analysis, 31% of developers who work at enterprises are separate from purchasing decisions. In comparison, this drops to 25% and 17% for large and non-enterprise developers, respectively.

So are you an Enterprise Developer?
Did you see yourself fitting in the data above? Then you probably are an Enterprise Developer. If you want to help the ecosystem grow, you can join our community of software creators by clicking this link.

Categories
Analysis

How Developers Generate Revenues

How do developers generate revenues

How businesses and developers as individuals make money from software projects is one of the most important decisions they have to make. Of all the business models and strategies available, companies and freelancers need to pick the ones that best match their market and goals. This post focuses on the popularity of revenue models among professional developers and the companies they work for.

Of all the revenue models we track in our surveys, contracted development / consulting is the most popular model. As of Q1 2022, 31% of professional developers are using this model, 7 percentage points more than the next closest revenue model – selling apps or software. Contracted development can span months or even years, allowing for developers and companies to properly plan out resources during the project. In addition, professional developers and their companies may find the clients they contract for require additional services, thus leading to additional revenue. Contracted development is tried-and-true as it’s been the most popular revenue model for the past five surveys.

Selling apps/software through an app store or their own portal is the second most popular revenue model, with almost a quarter (24%) of professional developers making money in this way. Furthermore, adoption of this model has been stable over two and a half years, despite “Epic” lawsuits against Apple and Google in 2021, which argued that these app stores had excessive fees and restrictive payment collection processes. App stores and portals are popular now, but other technologies, such as progressive web apps (PWAs), could start to impact the popularity of app stores. PWAs can work across multiple platforms, provide a native experience, and can help developers avoid high commission fees from app stores; all of which are big incentives to embrace the power of the web.

Do you wanna get more insights and contribute to our effort to shape the Developer Ecosystem?  Share your views on new technologies, tools or platforms for 2023, get a virtual goody bag and enter amazing prize draws! Start here

7% of professional developers are generating revenue from selling data

Interestingly, less than a tenth (7%) of professional developers are generating revenue by selling data. Data has often been referred to as the new gold and data breaches are heavily covered in news articles as well. If data is so valuable, why are so few professional developers using this model? Regulatory measures, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), could be hampering developers’ ability to sell user data based on the “right to be informed” principle. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) also has multiple restrictions for selling user data including an earnings cap based on a company’s total revenue. These are just a couple of examples of why selling data is difficult, which impacts its popularity as a revenue model.

Next, we will look at how the industries that developers are active in influence their revenue models. Contracted development is the most popular revenue model across all sectors, further emphasising the effectiveness of this model.

Developers active in the software products and services, data analytics, and financial services verticals tend to have the same revenue strategies. Professional developers in all three of these sectors have the same top-three revenue model choices. In addition to contracted development, app stores and selling services/APIs are the more popular methods for generating revenue in these sectors.

In-app purchases break into the top three among developers in the entertainment and media sector. 28% of professional developers in this vertical are using this method, double the percentage of the general developer population. In-app purchases are strongly associated with the freemium strategy where users are able to use/download applications for free with some features restricted to micro-purchases. This strategy has become quite popular in game development for building a base of users and incrementally generating revenue, as long as the quality of production is high. 

Contracted development is the revenue model of choice across all industry verticals

For professional developers working for companies in the marketing and advertising sectors, the advertising revenue model rises to second place, but it’s unable to unseat contracted development as the most used model. Looking across industries, there’s an apparent lack of usage of advertising as a revenue model among most other developers. On average, advertising is ranked eighth among professional developers outside of the marketing and advertising industry, being used about three times less often. Again, privacy protection may be hindering developers’ ability to use this revenue model effectively.

Finally, we evaluate revenue model usage among developers in different-sized companies. Again, contracted development remains the most popular model across every size of company. This strategy is the status quo for developers, and, with such popularity, it’s presumed to be the expectation by customers seeking professional development.

Developers working for micro-businesses are the most likely to report that they generate revenue from contracted development, with over a third (36%) of developers who work in them using this model. Professional developers in micro- businesses are also using multiple revenue models slightly more often than other developers. This indicates that companies of this size are trying to maximise their earning potential while relying heavily on the industry standard of contracted development. That being said, contracts don’t sell themselves, and micro-businesses have only 2-20 employees, so developers in these companies will likely be a close part of sales conversations.

Usage of the advertising revenue model declines as companies grow in size

Developers at large enterprises have a slightly different profile, as they tend to use the contracted development model less often than developers in other company sizes. We also see less use of the multiple revenue model, indicating that companies of this size have a more focused strategy for generating revenue.

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Community

Cheat Sheet – Developers, unite! Have your voice heard.

This is a cheat sheet focusing on the Developer Nation 23rd survey wave, giving you all the key details to make the most out of your experience:

What
11+ years of surveying developers.
The Developer Nation survey has been measuring the preferences, needs and wants of developers for more than 11 years. It’s a dynamic survey where each participating survey taker will have a unique path, based on their own background and experience. 

When
The Developer Nation Community will be launching its 23rd survey wave on June 2 in English. On June 9, the survey will be available in all other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese Traditional + Simplified, Korean, Russian and Japanese.

Who is it for
Developer Nation is borderless! Everyone’s welcome! 
The Developer Nation survey is global and open to all. In the previous edition, more than 20,000 developers and creators of all levels – from students to hobbyists and seasoned professionals – from 160+ countries, shared their views. 

We want to hear your opinion if you see yourself as a developer, software engineer or tech creator involved in Web, Mobile, Desktop, Cloud, DevOps, Industrial IoT & Consumer Electronics, AR/VR, Apps/extensions for 3rd party ecosystems, Games, Machine Learning & AI, and Data Science.

If you nodded at any of the above areas or descriptions, this survey is for you. Keep reading for the benefits of participating or start now.

Why participate
There are several benefits for those who take the survey. Some of these are:

Prizes
By participating, developers can win amazing prizes and unlock more as they proceed, including a complimentary virtual goody bag packed with free resources. 

Premium access to information
Understanding the trends can be paramount to developers’ next career move. We share the results, data and ecosystem insights with the participants and tech organisations who use the data to improve their developer offerings. 

Giving back and helping others
For each qualified survey response, we will donate USD $0.10 to a charity of your choice. Our goal is to reach USD $1,800+ in donations. Take the survey, pick a charity to support, and help us make a difference.

What’s different this time
Every wave is a new opportunity to give developers what they want. Here’s the latest benefits we introduce in this 23rd wave:

  • Weekly prize draws, including everyone who signs up to take the survey.
  • Special Prizes to be drawn for everyone taking the survey in the first 48 hours (2 winners: Nintendo Switch & iPhone 13).
  • A new way to reward participants: the more questions you answer the more chances you get to win. A participant’s name will be included multiple times in draws depending on the number of questions answered. 
  • Prizes include: Nintendo Switch, iPhone 13, Xiaomi RedMi 11, Samsung Galaxy S22, Amazon Echo Dot 4th Gen, Premium Subscriptions and Licences, Vouchers for online courses and tutorials, Gift cards and vouchers for Amazon, Spotify, Apple Store, Google Play, cash to fund your development projects or towards the gear you need up to $1,000 USD and many more prizes drawn every week.
  • Everyone who completes the survey will receive a virtual goody bag filled with free subscriptions, discounts and vouchers. 

You read this far, which should mean you’re interested. Why not start the survey and share your views on key topics only developers can understand? If you’re short of time, you can save your progress and continue later (you’ll need to sign up to save). 

Are you creating for AR/VR?
There is an additional, exclusive, survey dedicated to Augmented, Virtual and Mixed Reality creators, with the same benefits. AR/VR creators can share their reality views using this link.

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Analysis Community

Spotlight on Developers in China & the Rest of East Asia

What are some of the key differences between developers in East Asia, including the Greater China region, and the rest of the world? In the 22nd edition of our Developer Nation Survey we collected insights from developers and software engineers in East Asia to try to answer this exact question. Here is what we found!

“A fifth of the global developer population is located in either the Greater China region or the rest of East Asia”

We split the Greater China area from the rest of East Asia to provide more regional granularity. In terms of relative size, we find that almost a fifth (18%) of the global developer population is located in either the Greater China region (9%) or the rest of East Asia (9%). Breaking down East Asia into countries, we see that more than half of the developers here are spread across two countries: Indonesia (32%) and Japan (21%). When comparing developers across regions, we can see that just over a third (34%) of developers in the Greater China region have six or more years of experience, which is notably less than developers globally (43%). Furthermore, the Greater China region has a much smaller concentration (4% vs 22% globally) of highly-experienced developers (16+ years). With generally lower levels of experience in the Greater China area, aspiring developers may find starting a career here less competitive than developers in regions with higher levels of experience.

“East Asian developers outside China have similar levels of experience to the rest of the global developer population”

Both groups have a little more than a third (34%) of their developers with 11+ years of software development experience. However, East Asia’s data are largely propped up by Japan. The developer community in Japan tends to be highly experienced, with almost six in ten developers (59%) having 16+ years of experience. No other country has a higher concentration of developers with this level of experience. 

“Developers in the region are mostly either self-taught or have an undergraduate degree in computing”

The journey to coding mastery lacks a clearly defined path. Developers typically state they’ve used more than two learning methods on average to learn how to code. In general, the self-taught method is the most popular among developers globally, with more than 60% using this method. However, our data shows that the proportion of self-taught developers fluctuates significantly across regions.

In the Greater China area, the most popular method for developers to learn how to code is via an undergraduate degree in computing, with 50% having used this method. This is significantly higher than developers in other regions (41% -42%). We generally see a higher concentration of professional developers in Greater China (83%) than we do in the rest of the world (70%). It could be that the job market in Greater China more often requires a degree in computing or engineering, which would also explain why self-teaching is used less often in this region.

Developers in the rest of East Asia, however, tend to follow the learning trends of developers in other regions. Here, we see the self-taught method is the most popular method (61%), followed by an undergraduate degree in software engineering (41%). Analysing the data at a country level, we see developers in Indonesia are more diverse learners. Developers in this country stated that they used three methods on average when learning to code. Indonesian developers are more likely to learn via self-teaching, online courses, and developer boot camps than any other developers in East Asia. This is quite different from their peers in Japan who are the least likely to use online courses and bootcamps to learn how to code. Instead, developers in Japan are most likely to use the self-taught (63%) and on-the-job training (45%) methods when learning to code.

“Less Stack Overflow, more Segmentfault.com and Teratail.com

Next, we explore how developers interact with the popular online community, Stack Overflow, to understand their engagement levels with programming support. Stack Overflow has become a standard support community for many developers, with more than eight in ten (85%) of the general developer population reporting they’ve used or visited this popular question and answer site.

Our focus on developers in East Asia and the Greater China area shows Stack Overflow’s popularity falls below the global average. Developers in these regions are around three times less likely to visit Stack Overflow than developers in other regions. Developers in the Greater China area are the least engaged, with only 19% having an account, and only 11% having earned at least one badge. Developers in this region have other home-grown Q&A site alternatives, such as segmentfault.com, which could be contributing to the lower adoption of Stack Overflow.
Developers in Japan are skewing the perception of this region. Developers in Japan have even less activity on Stack Overflow than developers in the Greater China area. Here, only a little more than a third (36%) stated they use Stack Overflow. Furthermore, only about 5% have an account. Like developers in the Greater China area, our data does show usage of Stack Overflow increases among Japanese developers who have gained experience in software development, indicating that less experienced developers are using other platforms for support. Like China, Japan has other home-grown options like teratail.com where developers can field programming support from their peers, which may be the place new Japanese programmers visit more often to get answers to their questions.

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Community

Let the survey feedback begin

survey feedback

The Developer Economics Survey Q4 2019 has just closed and we couldn’t be more excited to see what our community has to tell us, not only through the survey but also through its valuable feedback comments.

Οur mission is to help the world understand developers and developers explore current trends in their industry. In order to get there, we run global surveys twice a year to explore trends across different areas of development, such as mobile, industrial IoT, ARVR, web and many more. We include hobbyists, professionals and students making sure our sample is as inclusive and diverse as possible wave on wave.

In total, we had 7,316 feedback comments from survey participants. Once more, our team took the time to read each and every comment! We have to admit, there are some pretty good ideas in there. We are currently assessing and evaluating the suggestions we received, hoping to include as many improvements as we can during our next survey wave.

Bottom line is we really appreciated every comment we received. The suggestions help us evolve, the positive comments really boost our mood, the negative ones make us work harder and the funny ones… let’s just say they are the highlights of our day.

Feedback from Developer Economics Q4 2019 Survey

Some were great suggestions:

  • Add keyboard controls to the survey to let me fill it out quicker.
  • As a follow up on my last survey suggestion, in which I suggested making your survey less visually bland by adding some backgrounds in place of stark white; I would like to add, making them seasonal background designs. Aesthetics is the key to development.
  • There used to be jokes in these, you should add them back. You also used to add a profile with a character in these, would love if that were back too.
  • Ask about ethics/privacy stuff, e.g. how are you feeling about the way the company you work for treats its user’s data.

Some were great to read:

  • I love you
  • Amazing experience! sharing it.
  • Great survey! Fun and educational
  • This was the most thorough survey I’ve ever completed. To the point and crisp questions. Wonderful job!!
  • I might sound blunt and rude but I had never heard of developer economics, previously. But I’m impressed by the smart selection of questions for this survey and the overall experience on your site has been awesome. Surely gonna remember developer economics
  • “console.log(“that was a great time.. I enjoyed answering.. Thank you!!”);”
  • The survey is one of the ways to reach millions of people and hear diversify opinions. Kudos to the organizers

And some just made us laugh:

  • Ale, you understand the ending of Evangelion? 
  • I’m sorry but I will not be able to pay 
  • as I said, fluffy support kittens. 
  • Delicious survey^^

During each survey wave, there are a few recurring comments we receive. The more prevailing have to do with the survey length – it’s long – and with our purpose. It’s not always easy to address each one separately, so we went ahead and created a blog post answering all these questions. We asked our Director of Research to create this with special care for our developer community. You can find it here.

Finally, now that the survey is closed, we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to complete the survey and share their comments with us. We promise to use all this insightful feedback to improve our future surveys.

Stay tuned for our upcoming State of the Developer’s Nation Report 18th edition which will be published by the end of this month. You will find it here as for our previous reports too.

Did you think of anything post-survey? Please do feel free to share with us.

 

P.S. For more developer news, tools, resources, events and fun, why not sign up to our newsletter.

Categories
Community

How developers see themselves?

developers

For the first time in our Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey,  we tried to introduce developers in their own words by asking them about how they see themselves.

We provided a set of 21 words and asked them to choose up to five to form a word sketch of their personality. We also gave them the opportunity to provide their own text description.

Here’s what we got:

developers

Over half of the developers say they are logical

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly six out of ten developers say they are logical. And as it turns out this is the most popular choice of description across all software development sectors, except in games development.  Next in line, but some way behind, are the descriptors team player and introvert at 37% each. By comparison, just 10% label themselves as an extrovert. But can you guess which programmers consider themselves less introvert? Those involved in AR/VR and IoT sector. Interesting, right?


Moving on to a slightly more unusual pair of labels: there are slightly more dog lovers than cat people in the developer population, although the numbers are close at 15% and 13% respectively. A much greater difference seems to exist though between developers working at night (night owls, 29%) and those who prefer the fresh morning breeze (early birds, 14%).  

 

developer

What about hobbies and spare time?

A third (33%) of developers say they are a reader, which makes it the most popular choice of description related to spare-time activities. It is closely followed by 31% who say they are a gamer. Our data shows that developers tend to perceive themselves differently as they grow older. More than one in three developers up to the age of 34 years consider themselves to be a gamer, compared to fewer than one in four of the 35-44 age group, and fewer than one in five of the 45-54-years.  Older programmers are more likely to describe themselves as readers.

 

“What’s this “real life” you’re talking about like? Is it similar to WoW? Does it run on a 64 bit OS?”


Other activities such as music and sport score lower, at 20% and 17%. A low 7% make LEGO models, although the popularity of LEGO seems to be very much dependent upon age. A respectable 12% of developers under 18 make LEGO models, but the proportion halves to 6% within the age group 18-24. 

What about the artistic ones?

Even though a developer’s work demands a high level of creativity, just 14% use “artistic” to describe themselves. Those involved in games or in augmented reality and virtual reality development are far more likely than others to use this word to describe themselves. 21% of game developers and about 25% of AR/VR developers see themselves as artistic, as compared to 16% or less of desktop, web and backend developers. 

Lastly, in out Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey, a few programmers were confused as to why we were asking the question and pondered if we were trying to set up a dating site. Well, we weren’t! We were collecting the data to create the State of the Developer Nation Report, 17th Edition.

Interested in joining forces with 40,000 developers worldwide in shaping the future of the developer ecosystem? Take our survey.

 

Categories
Community

Dear all taking our Developer Economics surveys – or wondering why you should

developer economics survey

First of all – thank you. Thank you for taking, or even for just considering taking, our Developer Economics Survey. Some of you have given us feedback (yes, we do read all of it!) asking what the survey is about, where we use the data, why we do this, and “who are you people anyway”? Right. About time we provided a comprehensive answer then! Transparency is, after all, one of our core values.

  • “Be more transparent about how you will use the data, who you will sell it to, how much you intend to spam me, and why, exactly, are you offering a range of inducements at later stages”
  • “Explaining a bit more what is this for. :)”
  • “More detailed description of your activities and details of cooperation with you for new users.”
  • “You just started to ask questions w/o sharing why you are asking your questions… Why?”
  • “It’s a little hard to be sure who this data is for. It seemed like it came from Mozilla, but got so many questions about Microsoft it made we wonder!”
  • “It’s cool but needs to be explained in more detail”

Our mission is to help the world understand and support developers.

In this way, we aim to contribute to evolving technology in all the ways that matter to developers and, consequently, to end users too. The Developer Economics surveys are our means of doing just that. Yes, of course we sell the insights and the anonymised aggregate data in the process, as we also need to make a living somehow. But out of all the ways in which we could be making a living, we very consciously choose this one, as we are a team of people who first of all strive to make this world a better place in the infinitesimal ways that we can, and this is our very own geeky way of doing so. We are sworn data geeks, or as our marketing team more elegantly puts it: Data is in our DNA.

Now, as to who our data and insights go to: Our client base includes the leading tech organisations, such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Mozilla and many more. We take pride in supporting them to design future technologies around actual developer needs and wants – your own needs and wants. So please be truthful in your answers, or you may lead the decision makers, and therefore your development tools, in a very wrong direction!  

Not all of our data is behind a paywall though. 

As a thank you to all of you who contribute to our life’s work, we release our free State of the Developer Nation report, filled with what we hope is valuable information for all developers out there, whether professionals, hobbyists, or just students on the onset of their exciting journey in the world of software development.

There are also free interactive graphs that aim to help you benchmark yourself (or rather, your technology choices) against the rest of the community. Check out the resources space on our Developer Economics website for all the data goodies we have to offer. 

It’s not just data we give back to the community. 

For the past three surveys and for every qualified response that you provided us, we have been donating $0.10 to a good cause within the developer world. In previous years we supported the Raspberry Pi foundation, and at the same time asked you to tell us where you think our contributions would count the most.

Many of you suggested we should support women in coding, and also developers in Africa. Combining the two suggestions, this time around, and for every qualified response that you provide us, we donate $0.10 to the South African Chapter of Women in Big Data. 

Thank you for making this happen!

  • “How are you supporting female developers?”
  • “Help the developers in west Africa gain the knowledge we desire.”
  • “It would be great if sub-sahara African countries could get more attention and accessibility to internship with all these companies.”
  • “Just want to suggest that you consider investing in Nigeria as the youth are passionate about learning but the constraints are just too much. To give you an idea, compare our achievements with the available resources.”

Onto the key question: what data do we collect? Here are the highlights. 


We track key trends in ten development areas, namely mobile, desktop, web, backend, industrial IoT, games, augmented and virtual reality, consumer electronics, machine learning and data science, and apps/extensions to third party ecosystems (such as voice or CRM platforms). For the areas you tell us you’re involved in we ask you which programming languages, tools and platforms you use, how happy you are with the ones that you use (say, with your selected Cloud PaaS), and what you consider important in tools/platforms of this category (for example, scalability, ease of development, community). We ask you not just about the “how”, but also about the “what” and the “why”: why you got into development to begin with, what type of projects you’re working on, if and how you’re building a business around software development, and more. By understanding your motivations, projects and aspirations the technology builders can design solutions that are better suited to help you achieve your goals. We also ask about your learning interests, methods, and needs. Hopefully, that will lead to learning experiences suited to your style. Last but not least, and in order to help focus efforts on the most promising technologies, we gauge interest in and measure adoption of relatively new or emerging technologies, such as fog/edge computing and self-driving cars.

Developer Economics Survey: We know it is long.

Taking in your past feedback on the matter, we have put effort in making it shorter, and when some of you actually noticed I am not (very) ashamed to say I was hopping around the room in excitement. Some of you suggested that we break it down into smaller surveys. I might as well admit it, I am the villain who stubbornly resists that change!

The reason is simple: most of you are involved in more than one development areas, using multiple categories of tools, and the whole point here is to capture your full experience, across all sectors, and to map synergies between tools and platforms. We wouldn’t be able to do that if we were to ask you about each of the areas in a separate survey (plus we would be pestering you to take a survey ten times as much! You’re convinced now, right?). As another of our core values is to be data-driven, here’s the key data point behind this decision: “More than 80% of developers are involved in 2+ of the development areas that we track, and half are into at least four.” 
This is just an outline of who we are, what we do, and why. In case you have any comments or questions, please feel free to drop us a note and let us know of your thoughts. If you have already taken our 18th Developer Economics survey, we hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll spread the word among your friends – we’d love to welcome you all to our community. If you haven’t yet taken the survey we very much hope that you will, and that you won’t forget to say hello under that “Anything we forgot to ask?” open question at the end! There are 20+ pairs of eyes eagerly reading your feedback almost in real time, and virtually waving back to you. See you there.

Take the survey

developer economics survey

Categories
Community

Calling All Developers to Shape the Future of Software Development

shape the future of software development

The latest Developer Economics survey is now live, ready to measure the pulse of the developer ecosystem, helping the world understand developers and vice versa. We are calling all developers to shape the future of software development.

Here are a few facts about our developer surveys:

    • This is the 17th edition of the semi-annual Developer Economics surveys.
    • It is supported by the leading developer communities and technology vendors around the world: Amazon Alexa, Azure, ARM, Connected London, Intuit, Here, Digital Ocean, Nutanix, DZone, Hacker Nest, Heroku, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Pivotal, VMWare, Salesforce, Samsung, SAP, Sitepoint, and more. However, it is run by the independent analyst firm /Data. (https://www.slashdata.co/)
    • We reach over 40,000+ developers in 167 countries annually.

Who is this for? Who will shape the future of software development?

Software developers of all profiles including professionals, hobbyists, and students who work across all major areas: mobile, web, desktop, cloud, IoT, AR/VR, games, machine learning & data science.

What has changed in the survey?

  • We have redesigned our questionnaire to capture all trends & insights related to the developer ecosystem.
  • Developers can now sign-up for a global, independent, ever-growing community.
  • We have a new Point System. Developers can earn points through several actions and unlock exclusive content and prizes.
  • The survey theme. It’s now easier to walk through the questions with minimum distractions. That said, we try to make the survey taking as fun as possible, so that survey participants can enjoy a few fun facts throughout their experience.
  • We want to hear the true developers’ voice so we reward them with amazing prizes, gadgets, licenses, etc.
  • For each completed response to the survey, /Data will donate USD $0.1 to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to support the developers of tomorrow access tools and learning courses.
  • There is a revamped Referral program available for all survey takers. Sharing is caring!

& What has stayed the same?

  • It features questions that cover developers’ level of coding skills, favourite programming languages, technologies used for work/hobby, go-to spaces for learning and resources, as well as preferred tools for specific areas of development: mobile, web, desktop, cloud, IoT, AR/VR, games, machine learning & data science.
  • We still care about learning and giving back, on top of helping devs
  • Available to developers around the world in English, plus 8 other languages: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, Korean.

For any additional information regarding the Developer Economics Survey, feel free to contact the Developer Economics team at community@developereconomics.com.

Developer Economics survey is now open, inviting all developers to take the survey and voice their opinions about platforms, apps, languages, APIs, revenues, dev tools, and more.

Are you a developer? Have your say!

Join us today!

Categories
Business Community Interviews

Developer Heroes: Meet Rachel a.k.a the Wonder Woman

Developer Hero

Who? Developer hero: Rachel Bilski

Where? Brighton, UK.

What? Web developer, agency-side

The new Developer Economics research survey is live – featuring thousands of developers all over the world! Participate now and let us know what your superpower is.

 Hello! Tell us about your role and what you do:

 I mainly work as a web developer, both front- and back-end. I do a lot of CMS work, with existing CMS platforms, and I also build content management systems from scratch, mainly working with PHP.

What kind of languages do you work with?

In the front-end, I use the standards – HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I also dabble with things like Python, Ruby on Rails. And of course PHP.

How did you get started?

Well the real story is that, when I was 13, I liked going to fan sites for Buffy the Vampire Slayer – so I learned how to build my own fan site through Lissa Explains it All. Which some developers may remember from back in the olden days!

Can we see that site on the Wayback Machine?

Can you see it? No, you cannot! But, the legit explanation of how I became a web developer is that I originally worked games development, then in QA which I didn’t really enjoy, so I moved to web development.

You’re agency-side. How do you think that compares with in-house development?

I like to say in-house is a little more straightforward, only because you get to work on a project for a long time, for years potentially. But in agencies, there’s usually a wider variety of work, and you have to be pretty flexible.  

What are clients asking for right now?

We get a lot of requests for emerging technologies now, but clients are not necessarily sure what to do with them. They’ll say: “we want to do something with VR or AR” or “we want to do 3D, 360 video or 3D worlds” or whatever. We have to guide them through the options.

How helpful do you find developer surveys?

If you’re a developer who works in an agency or a freelance developer, it’s easy to forget about the business side of things. And maybe you’re not a natural sales person. I mean it’s taken me a number of years to become more commercially minded, which helps me get involved in more business-related decisions about the tech we use and why.

Do you think developers sometimes undersell themselves?

Yeah, I would say so.

Have you found any challenges working in a male-dominated industry?

I’ve had both good and bad experiences. I work in a predominantly female developer team, which has been nothing but positive.

I also go to events for women in technology, because I like to talk to other women who are in my field. But, I’ve also experienced some negative things. Not always outright, but you do pick up on – to use a buzzword – microaggressions.

People can be dismissive. You know, sometimes if I go to a meeting with a male colleague, people will talk to him and ignore me even though on a technical front we’re at the same level. Which is another reason why I like to go to women’s groups because they don’t automatically assume you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You think things are changing?

I think some things are changing. There’s a lot more diversity programmes, not just for women but for LGBT groups and other minority groups.  

But, I think that until there’s a bigger culture change… it’s not that women don’t want to go into tech, it’s just they don’t want to go into this tech environment. They don’t want to go somewhere where they’re not wanted.

So where do you go to get tech-related news?

Well, Twitter. But there are also loads of developers on Reddit, though I rarely comment. But I do have a male-sounding handle on Reddit for when I do comment.

Has that actually helped?

Yeah, people take you far more seriously. In fact, a lot of women do the same thing. That’s sadly the way it has to be sometimes!

Get involved! The new Developer Economics research wave is live – featuring thousands of developers worldwide, from San Francisco to Singapore. Add your voice.

What’s going up and what’s going down in the software industry?

There’s been a lot of focus on how people are using messaging applications more at the moment and generalised open social media is a bit more in the decline, which is leading to a lot more of things such as chatbots which are really interesting, and artificial intelligence (or ‘fake’ artificial intelligence) which I personally find really interesting. From finance, to health, to learning, I think it’s a great way to make these products and campaigns more helpful and user-friendly, keeping up with how our use of technology is changing.

And there’s VR of course, that’s had a real surge over the last year or so as the kits become more affordable and more widespread, especially as use in business seems to be increasing.

Personally I think the use of (and requests for) mobile apps has really declined, as people have realised how much can be done with just the web alone, and more things are done using messaging platforms, people are realising you don’t need an app for every little thing – which is great, because it makes the web a little more open, you aren’t locked away in an app for each activity or company. Similarly, a couple of years ago, everyone wanted a Facebook application – you don’t see those anymore at all!

Are you working on the projects you would like to work on?

I am, I get to work on a real variety of projects which is great. I love the power of the web and what we can do with it now, so I love working on the more cutting edge projects we get to do sometimes, but even something as simple as building a website up from scratch – from just an idea and a goal to a fully formed website that helps people find what they need or helps get a message out there is wonderful. I love seeing our projects go from a quickly sketched wireframe to a real website.

I would definitely like to work with more artificial intelligence type stuff though – so I’m hoping we get some projects like that in soon!

Join the new Developer Economics survey – featuring thousands of developers worldwide. 

What super power  would you like to have and  what’s your favourite super hero ?

I don’t know!! I guess if I was a superhero I would like to have the ability to consume and understand huge amounts of information at a time…like a computer.

But it’s not a very good superpower.

My favourite superhero is Wonder Woman of course!

If you would like to feature in our Meet the Devs series, let us know.