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Stack Overflow Reveals Results From 'Largest Developer Survey Ever Conducted' (stackoverflow.com)
More than 64,000 developers from 213 countries participated in this year's annual survey by Stack Overflow -- the largest number ever -- giving a glimpse into the collective psyche of programmers around the world. An anonymous reader quotes their announcement:
A majority of developers -- 56.5% -- said they were underpaid. Developers who work in government and non-profits feel the most underpaid, while those who work in finance feel the most overpaid... While only 13.1% of developers are actively looking for a job, 75.2% of developers are interested in hearing about new job opportunities...
When asked what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% of respondents said remote options were a top priority. 65% of developers reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they're full-time remote or almost all the time. Also, the highest job satisfaction ratings came from developers who work remotely full-time.
62.5% of the respondents reported using JavaScript, while 51.2% reported SQL, with 39.7% using Java and 34.1% using C# -- but for the #5 slot, "the use of Python [32.0%] overtook PHP [28.1%] for the first time in five years." Yet as far as which languages developers wanted to continue using, "For the second year in a row, Rust was the most loved programming language... Swift, last year's second most popular language, ranked as fourth. For the second year in a row, Visual Basic (for 2017, Visual Basic 6, specifically) ranked as the most dreaded language; 88.3% of developers currently using Visual Basic said they did not want to continue using it."
When asked what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% of respondents said remote options were a top priority. 65% of developers reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they're full-time remote or almost all the time. Also, the highest job satisfaction ratings came from developers who work remotely full-time.
62.5% of the respondents reported using JavaScript, while 51.2% reported SQL, with 39.7% using Java and 34.1% using C# -- but for the #5 slot, "the use of Python [32.0%] overtook PHP [28.1%] for the first time in five years." Yet as far as which languages developers wanted to continue using, "For the second year in a row, Rust was the most loved programming language... Swift, last year's second most popular language, ranked as fourth. For the second year in a row, Visual Basic (for 2017, Visual Basic 6, specifically) ranked as the most dreaded language; 88.3% of developers currently using Visual Basic said they did not want to continue using it."
Those poor programmers using Javascript. What a lousy language.
(If anyone wants to know why, I will pick one feature out of many. Say you wrote a large program in Javascript, which is happening more often these days. Then you want to refactor by renaming a variable. In Java or C or C# you can refactor by using an IDE automatically, and if somehow you miss an instance, it will be caught at compile time. In Perl or Objective C or Smalltalk, it will caught at runtime in the worst case. But in Javascript, it might not be caught even at runtime, and instead will just cause strange behavior).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, statically typed languages look overwhelming/verbose and take more time to type and plan out
That nasty "planning" - there's no time for it in today's culture, where everything is just thrown together after a few "planning sessions" that are basically verbal diarrhea pushed by "big vision" marketing and bosses who may have had a clue in the past, but don't any more and are flailing about to find some project to justify their jobs, same as almost everyone else chasing the big-money exit strategy dream instead of doing the hard stuff like, you know, planning.
The whole "vision thing" has turned software into the cesspool it is today.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yeah, I've never talked about it in those terms, but we all know bullshit marketing-speak when we see it. On the other hand, I've often said "thank God for Stack Overflow" after finding a quick and informative answer to a technical question I had.
It's an incredibly valuable resource. I often find it useful when I'm first digging into a new language or technology. Nearly every basic or even advanced question I tend to ask has been asked and answered already, and I can just reap the benefits.
But the *real* payoff, in my opinion, is when you find answers to incredibly obscure issues for which you might have to work days or even *weeks* to figure out, and some kind soul who has already gone through that pain shares knowledge for the good of everyone else, even though doing so is even more work for them.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Of course this then raises the question of what's in it for the people who are actually answering the questions?
I can't speak for anyone but me, but I answer questions on Stack Overflow because I find that effectively communicating how something works requires organizing your thoughts in a way that is of benefit to my own work later, and as I get more seniority also helpful in my ability to explain concepts and ideas to others in my workplace.
In that regard, contributing to Stack Overflow does help me "level up", since it gives me somewhere to practice a skill that is critical to being a senior engineer and to cement my own understanding of concepts.
To summarize, a bunch of dime-a-dozen web guys, who rely on stack overflow for every other line of code, have declared that they are underpaid. And, they would prefer to work at home so that if someone asks them a hard question, they can ask it on stack overflow before answering.