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2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

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Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#41

Post by umvi »

> We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly.

I'm torn here. It's hard to correct for bias. It would be like if a bank had a survey and had people rate their financial stability - but they had to have an account with the bank to participate in the survey. Wouldn't that bias the results in favor of financially responsible people?

I'd be interested how many 0 rep new accounts with lots of downvotes claimed high competence vs. established accounts. It could very well be that people with SO accounts who are willing to take the time for SO's survey are the type of people that are more competent on average than developers that don't have SO accounts and don't participate in surveys.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#42

Post by piaste »

strictnein wrote: post #17

> "almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly." Not at all. It's a self selecting survey, the people who choose to answer are likely more confident in their abilities than those that don't, and, contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly…

> contrary to common understanding, it is perfectly valid for more than 50% of people to be above average. Average != median

For this kind of question ('is X above/below average?'), however, I would expect that people are _actually_ thinking of the median.

Consider a high Gini-coefficient country, where the income distribution looks like this: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 6, 999999. If you ask people 'is the person earning 5 above or below average?' they will say he is above average, even though he is actually above the median and below the average.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#44

Post by nitrogen »

hodder wrote: post #14
andy_adams wrote: post #3

Can someone help this old (2^5 years) developer out? I've worked with a number of programming languages over the years, and have never found a combination that brings me such joy and productivity as Ruby and Rails. However, I've always felt that Python and Ruby were very similar in style & goal. Can someone who is experienced in both Rails & Django explain why Python & Django are trending up so quickly, while Ruby &…

Django is likely rising because Python is rising. Most people are learning Python as their first language, and Django is a logical tool for them to try to build web apps.

I seem to recall that Matz, creator of Ruby, once said (paraphrasing) that he didn't try to create a popular language, he tried to create a beautiful language.

Python's creator, on the other hand, worked at Google for a while, and like Sun, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft before them, schools and beginners are naturally drawn to things used by the big companies.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#45

Post by sansnomme »

tomca32 wrote: post #32
andy_adams wrote: post #3

Can someone help this old (2^5 years) developer out? I've worked with a number of programming languages over the years, and have never found a combination that brings me such joy and productivity as Ruby and Rails. However, I've always felt that Python and Ruby were very similar in style & goal. Can someone who is experienced in both Rails & Django explain why Python & Django are trending up so quickly, while Ruby &…

I also don't understand this. Even today, Rails is, by far, the most productive environment that exists for developing a web application. I speak this as someone who also wrote a ton of backends in Node.js, Java, and many other languages (never tried Django though, so I don't know about that). Almost all of those applications would have been 10% of the effort if they were just Rails apps. A sibling comment here menti…

Authn/Authz needs to be integrated into code already.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#46

Post by claudiulodro »

Interesting that WordPress is the most dreaded tech every single year for the last 3+ years, yet WP "market share" is increasing every single year (it's now powering 1/3 of the web). Is it a disconnect between developers and non-developers? Is it just that developers don't like to work on "boring" tech, and working on WP is not a super-great resume builder? Curious to hear what people think.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#47

Post by atonse »

Kudos to the Visual Studio Code team for all its success.

VS Code and TypeScript, are kinds of technologies and tools that just win entirely on their strong merit, in spite the image of who has created them.

.NET Core is getting up there too. MS has always been a developer friendly company but they are definitely earning mindshare back from non .NET developers.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#48

Post by hnarn »

umvi wrote: post #41

> We asked respondents to evaluate their own competence, for the specific work they do and years of experience they have, and almost 70% of respondents say they are above average while less than 10% think they are below average. This is statistically unlikely with a sample of over 70,000 developers who answered this question, to put it mildly. I'm torn here. It's hard to correct for bias. It would be like if a bank h…

You have a point. It's not hard to imagine that actually using SO in the first place might correlate to you being an above average developer (among all developers).

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#49

Post by fxfan »

the_arun wrote: post #21
trymas wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi answer questions in the survey may explain that?

I see. One way of calculating % in multiple choice is ((total No. of C likers)/ total count of answers) * 100 to get % of popularity of C.

You can just add all the percentages and divide by that number and you'll get the number you're talking about.

Re: 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results

#50

Post by bluGill »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #26

"Men are more likely to say that being tasked with non-development work is a problem for them, while gender minority respondents are more likely to say that toxic work environments are a problem." Interesting. Isn't the former a subset of the latter?

No, there is some overlap, but most non-development tasks are not really toxic, just overhead.

I have to interview other developers. This is not a part of a toxic work environment (in fact it can prevent them).

Toxic work environment be entirely development, for instance if they put your computer in the bathroom I'd call that toxic.

I suspect most females mean some form of sexual harassment is tolerated. This is a big problem that men tend to culturally ignore.

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