The results are in! The annual Stack Overflow Developers’ survey provides one of the industry’s largest and most important datasets—it has invaluable insights into developers, workplaces and technologies that anyone involved in the tech sector should pay attention to. We’re going to break it down section-by-section and help you better understand what the tech sector looks like in 2019.
Technology
The biggest winner this year was Python, which has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance over the last few years. It’s now the fourth most popular language in the world, behind only Javascript, HTML/CSS, and SQL. A lot of this seems to be tied in with the growth of machine learning and big data: Python has an elegant, easy-to-learn syntax that’s good at handling large datasets.
jQuery doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It was one of the most dreaded frameworks and its seen as archaic by a lot of developers, but it’s the load-bearing wall of the internet at this point and was far and away from the most commonly-used framework in 2019.
Despite still being used by a relatively small number of developers Vue.js continues to be wildly popular amongst those who use it. We may see it supplant jQuery in the next few years, though I’m not sure I’d put money on it.
Since the emergence of Docker in 2013, we’ve seen consistent growth in containerization—both in terms of developers using it, and in terms of technologies like Kubernetes built around it. If you’re new to containers and want to know how to set up Docker, check out this great Docker guide.
Developers
The United States (22%) and India (13%) are well ahead of the competition in terms of developers, with Britain and Germany both trailing around 5%. Unsurprisingly, a vast majority of developers identified as European, with South Asian being the runner-up. It’s important to note that Stack Overflow is an English-language board that conducts the survey exclusively amongst its user base, which might be skewing the results. For example, China contributed relatively few developers to the survey, which isn’t in line with other data we have on global development numbers.
The number of female and non-binary developers has slowly increased (about 1% positive change each this year), though tech remains relatively male-dominated, with 89-95% of developers identifying as male. Interestingly, the number of developers self-reporting as transgender doubled this year, though that may be due to a change in the survey’s methodology—it was its own separate question, rather than being integrated into the question about the respondents’ gender.
The Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (or computer engineering, or software engineering; these three have been folded together in the results) remains by far the most popular entry-point into the industry, though it’s not necessarily the endpoint: a solid quarter of developers hold a postgraduate degree.
Working Life
More senior developers are working remotely, though relatively few are still full-time remote—it seems more common to work 2-3 days/week from home, then come into the office the rest of the time. Remote work remains very popular amongst developers, and management is slowly embracing it. The data runs contrary to common wisdom: it indicates that remote developers tend to be significantly more productive, though there may be some selection bias in this—if senior developers are being allowed to work remotely, it stands to reason that remote workers are doing better work.
The career track for developers is pretty fascinating: relatively few are interested in becoming management compared with other industries. Instead, they tend to branch into fields like SRE that are higher-paying than what they were previously doing but aren’t necessarily management roles.
What’s really interesting is the resurgence and refinement of old technologies to fit new niches. Containers have been around for decades but didn’t start picking up steam until 2014-2015 and look properly set to become the new standard in the next few years. Python is a dinosaur and was traditionally only really popular in data science, but it’s now bigger than PHP. We saw this earlier in the decade with Javascript—what had been a cute tool in the 90s and early/mid-2000s crashed into developing technologies like XML, and now you’d struggle to find a website that doesn’t use AJAX requests.
Predicting what will be invented tomorrow is hard, but if you want to look forward intelligently, it could behove you to look at existing technologies and ask “what is holding this back?” A lot of old technology is one new invention away from a huge comeback—containers needed Docker, Python needed machine learning, Javascript needed AJAX. Paying attention to what existing technology lacks can help you to predict when and how it’s going to make a comeback, and that can really pay dividends.
