This is always an interesting breakdown, and I feel like I should do something with it or learn something from it, but I'm never exactly sure what. Does anyone have any interesting ideas of...
This is always an interesting breakdown, and I feel like I should do something with it or learn something from it, but I'm never exactly sure what. Does anyone have any interesting ideas of takeaways from this?
If I had more free time, I'd take the top "beloved" languages and learn their basics so I could see why they're so beloved and how I might apply some of their ideas to my own work. E.g., people...
If I had more free time, I'd take the top "beloved" languages and learn their basics so I could see why they're so beloved and how I might apply some of their ideas to my own work. E.g., people really love Rust, I'd love to have the time to learn why that is.
Well opportunity knocks! I use Python and TypeScript a lot for work, and I'm a Rust dabbler. Rust is great because it's fast and gives you a lot of low-level language options with the readability...
Well opportunity knocks! I use Python and TypeScript a lot for work, and I'm a Rust dabbler.
Rust is great because it's fast and gives you a lot of low-level language options with the readability and tooling of a higher level language. I think that's where most of they hype comes - it delivers well on the same things that both C and Python deliver on, albeit in different ways.
Some personal takeaways: It doesn't surprise me how many programmers are working in web frontends, but given how many describe themselves as full-stack engineers (which personally reads as...
Some personal takeaways:
It doesn't surprise me how many programmers are working in web frontends, but given how many describe themselves as full-stack engineers (which personally reads as "jack-of-all-trades") and skew towards younger people, the state of most web interfaces being slightly broken makes perfect sense.
I didn't think IBM DB2 was well known enough to be so hated, especially with how much more hated it is than Oracle.
The platform question doesn't really make much sense to me given that Linux, AWS, and Wordpress can be considered a platform. I guess it makes some sense, but they are so vastly different from each other that it doesn't exactly make sense to compare them. Especially since AWS et. al. offers multiple platforms, so providing that answer doesn't actually mean anything.
Ha! I knew Mac developers were just a super loud minority.
I feel it's already too late, but maybe I should have gone into big data a long time ago. Especially since I'm a bit of a database nerd who cares just a bit too much about how my data is organized.
I guess I'm not the only one who considers working in tech to be fairly unsatisfying and underpaying.
I'm worried about how many people putting 'office culture and work environment' as their top reason to choose a job because I think that it means that 'playground offices' that silicon valley tech companies tend to have are way more effective at keeping staff than I would like to believe.
I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s, I found a statistic that said that computer programmers could make upwards of $150K. The fact that that seems to be the upper limit for the highest tiers in modern inflated currency is a bit sad, but not unexpected.
This whole survey is heavily biased towards "people in the StackOverflow community", and I'm not really sure how to take that. I know that there are lots of answers on StackOverflow, but I've never really participated in it other than reading what people have wrote in it. But the fact that more than 50% of the respondents check it out "almost daily" or more, I'm going to say that further reinforces my earlier Jack-of-all-trades comment. :P
Maybe that also means "it's not a playground office and my employer doesn't have the expectation that I spend the night. It's actually just a job without any bullshit, so that's neat. Good Work...
I'm worried about how many people putting 'office culture and work environment' as their top reason to choose a job because I think that it means that 'playground offices' that silicon valley tech companies tend to have are way more effective at keeping staff than I would like to believe.
Maybe that also means "it's not a playground office and my employer doesn't have the expectation that I spend the night. It's actually just a job without any bullshit, so that's neat. Good Work environment.". That was my first thought anyway.
That was my first thought as well, until I switched between men, women, and non-binary answers and saw it was about the same. I have to wonder if it's eliciting different responses based on...
I'm worried about how many people putting 'office culture and work environment' as their top reason to choose a job because I think that it means that 'playground offices' that silicon valley tech companies tend to have are way more effective at keeping staff than I would like to believe.
That was my first thought as well, until I switched between men, women, and non-binary answers and saw it was about the same. I have to wonder if it's eliciting different responses based on different readings. Like maybe men are thinking, "I have to work with people who like heavy metal and microbrews and use tabs instead of spaces," whereas women are thinking "I have to work someplace where they take gender equality seriously." Seems like too generic of a response to be meaningful in such a large group of people.
I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s, I found a statistic that said that computer programmers could make upwards of $150K. The fact that that seems to be the upper limit for the highest tiers in modern inflated currency is a bit sad, but not unexpected.
Don't take the fact that that was the upper limit on their survey as an indication that it's an upper limit in the real world. It's nowhere near the upper limit. Also, if it's like previous years, they're only counting salary and not stock compensation or other benefits. You can make significantly more than US$150k/year working in tech if you're a skilled engineer, both in salary and in total compensation.
Underpaying is a little surprising. The usual reaction to software salaries on reddit/even hackernews somehow/tildes, especially whenever levels is posted, is some weird mix of people complaining...
I guess I'm not the only one who considers working in tech to be fairly unsatisfying and underpaying.
Underpaying is a little surprising. The usual reaction to software salaries on reddit/even hackernews somehow/tildes, especially whenever levels is posted, is some weird mix of people complaining about the salaries being too high. God forbid the greedy developers "stealing" from poor old Google's bank account.
It's cool to see things like Levels getting more and more data. I remember when it was posted to HackerNews early on in its life, and pretty much all they had was basic data on FAANG. Not sure if...
It's cool to see things like Levels getting more and more data. I remember when it was posted to HackerNews early on in its life, and pretty much all they had was basic data on FAANG. Not sure if it's as much of thing in other countries, but it's relatively taboo to discuss compensation in the US, and the more we can break that down, the better (or at least that's my opinion).
Don't be put off by the underpaying part; I just think that developers are generally more valuable than they are paid. A lot of people in the industry always talk about needing to keep swapping...
Don't be put off by the underpaying part; I just think that developers are generally more valuable than they are paid. A lot of people in the industry always talk about needing to keep swapping between companies in order to get raises because none of the employers think enough of their value to do so.
As far as the unsatisfying part, that's a little bit harder to explain. I think a lot of it comes from the "grass is greaner on the other side" mentality. Basically, most developers want to work on shiny new technologies, but corporate jobs mean doing what you're told.
Right now I work as an analyst at a small company, which is basically to say that I do everything involving technology for them; anything from writing new software to maintaining services and even marketing and sales on the side. Right now the pandemic has made the world go topsy-turvy and I have basically been reduced to a salesman, which means I am extremely unsatisfied with what I am doing. Heck, I'm posting on Tildes right now when I should be working leads.
I wonder if this is an artifact of how hated IBM is in general. Maybe the attachment of IBM's name is worse than even Oracle's name for people who don't know too much about databases who responded...
I didn't think IBM DB2 was well known enough to be so hated, especially with how much more hated it is than Oracle.
I wonder if this is an artifact of how hated IBM is in general. Maybe the attachment of IBM's name is worse than even Oracle's name for people who don't know too much about databases who responded to the survey.
I'm surprised they have such a bad reputation, but then again I've never been one of their customers. The only thing I've heard that is really bad with IBM is how they are extremely proprietary...
I'm surprised they have such a bad reputation, but then again I've never been one of their customers. The only thing I've heard that is really bad with IBM is how they are extremely proprietary and they support a ton of legacy systems.
I think that in the eyes of most of the people who would be responding to the StackOverflow survey, they're the epitome of the company that was once great but is now just a moneyed zombie that...
I think that in the eyes of most of the people who would be responding to the StackOverflow survey, they're the epitome of the company that was once great but is now just a moneyed zombie that refuses to finally die.
They definitely don't have a reputation for building amazing products anymore, and there seems to be a lot of fear whenever they buy a company like Red Hat that people are fans of that they'll end up killing it in an effort to make themselves relevant again.
IBM is certainly hated (or at least "not loved") among the Stack Overflow set, but I don't find it credible that it's more hated than Oracle—Oracle is universally despised among every developer...
IBM is certainly hated (or at least "not loved") among the Stack Overflow set, but I don't find it credible that it's more hated than Oracle—Oracle is universally despised among every developer I've ever discussed it with, and essentially always has been.
The love/hate values are normalized by use, which probably explains why DB2 is so high despite not being as widely used.
Ah, that'll do it. Didn't realize the values were normalized. Absolutely makes sense, my experience discussing Oracle with people is effectively the same as yours.
Ah, that'll do it. Didn't realize the values were normalized. Absolutely makes sense, my experience discussing Oracle with people is effectively the same as yours.
Front-end development is a weird place. In a way, it feels like it should barely exist. You're creating a bunch of text boxes and fill them with data from a database. That takes some work to...
It doesn't surprise me how many programmers are working in web frontends, but given how many describe themselves as full-stack engineers (which personally reads as "jack-of-all-trades") and skew towards younger people, the state of most web interfaces being slightly broken makes perfect sense.
Front-end development is a weird place. In a way, it feels like it should barely exist. You're creating a bunch of text boxes and fill them with data from a database. That takes some work to manage, but why is development a thing in that space? The backend, with security concerns or balancing traffic actually sees huge shifts in volume and best practices, and deals with hardware in a real way but front-end stuff is still mostly... fill some boxes with text.
Obviously, it's mostly HTML/CSS/JS never being intended for what they're used for today, so you have to tame them with thick layers of cruft, which is apparently still an unsolved problem. But man, it's weird that we still don't have some reasonable standard for it that basically automates the process to a point a designer can do it. There's like, literally a thousand frameworks trying to accomplish the exact same thing, reinventing the wheel over and over and over. It's kinda insane.
It also makes me wonder whether sticking with HTML/CSS/JS was a mistake. A modern website doesn't run on a 15 year old browser, we've kinda come to accept that. Why not replace all this shit with something better? Why isn't that an obvious goal we're working towards?
It's a miracle the web exists as is. It took 9 years or so to get mostly full support for the bloody FETCH protocol. Basically, getting all browser vendors to agree on anything, even with the...
It's a miracle the web exists as is. It took 9 years or so to get mostly full support for the bloody FETCH protocol.
Basically, getting all browser vendors to agree on anything, even with the Google semi-monopoly, is a truly insane amount of work.
There's no way an alternative spec would ever practically get by. It's honestly a miracle the web works as well as it does. Seriously.
Well, agreed. It would require a miracle. But "miracles" do happen and they mostly do at a point where what came before them was identified as being so shitty that a new alternative gained...
Well, agreed. It would require a miracle. But "miracles" do happen and they mostly do at a point where what came before them was identified as being so shitty that a new alternative gained momentum. I'd say much of the web has reached that point.
As for examples: Flash was the only reasonable way to do video when youtube started and it's a dead technology, with HTML5 having more or less completely replaced it by now. Javascript came out of nowhere and is now considered an integral part of the web (obliterating Java applets). For what it's worth, it seems like at least additions to the standard are a thing that happens.
Sure, some sites are still simple displays of content and straightforward forms, and for these there are plenty of tools/services to build them with a simple GUI. Then there are some sites that...
Sure, some sites are still simple displays of content and straightforward forms, and for these there are plenty of tools/services to build them with a simple GUI. Then there are some sites that are full-blown client-side applications in the browser. Most sites are in between, with varying degrees of client-side interactivity, behavior tracking, asynchronous data fetching, complex forms, etc. Front-end developers definitely have a place in the industry.
Also, regarding this: Is there anyone claiming they're anything other than a minority of developers? They're not even a majority of developers writing for Apple platforms.
Also, regarding this:
Ha! I knew Mac developers were just a super loud minority.
Is there anyone claiming they're anything other than a minority of developers? They're not even a majority of developers writing for Apple platforms.
Certainly not, but I don't work in a large group and the loudness of the mac crowd tends to get irritating after a while. Don't get me wrong, I get why they act the way they do, but I just get...
Certainly not, but I don't work in a large group and the loudness of the mac crowd tends to get irritating after a while. Don't get me wrong, I get why they act the way they do, but I just get tired of it after a while The PCMR types who prod them to talk about it are honestly more annoying.
Don't take any of these points too seriously; they're just lightweight observation from someone who's a relative outsider.
Accompanying blog post: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/05/27/2020-stack-overflow-developer-survey-results/
This is always an interesting breakdown, and I feel like I should do something with it or learn something from it, but I'm never exactly sure what. Does anyone have any interesting ideas of takeaways from this?
If I had more free time, I'd take the top "beloved" languages and learn their basics so I could see why they're so beloved and how I might apply some of their ideas to my own work. E.g., people really love Rust, I'd love to have the time to learn why that is.
Well opportunity knocks! I use Python and TypeScript a lot for work, and I'm a Rust dabbler.
Rust is great because it's fast and gives you a lot of low-level language options with the readability and tooling of a higher level language. I think that's where most of they hype comes - it delivers well on the same things that both C and Python deliver on, albeit in different ways.
Some personal takeaways:
It doesn't surprise me how many programmers are working in web frontends, but given how many describe themselves as full-stack engineers (which personally reads as "jack-of-all-trades") and skew towards younger people, the state of most web interfaces being slightly broken makes perfect sense.
I didn't think IBM DB2 was well known enough to be so hated, especially with how much more hated it is than Oracle.
The platform question doesn't really make much sense to me given that Linux, AWS, and Wordpress can be considered a platform. I guess it makes some sense, but they are so vastly different from each other that it doesn't exactly make sense to compare them. Especially since AWS et. al. offers multiple platforms, so providing that answer doesn't actually mean anything.
Ha! I knew Mac developers were just a super loud minority.
I feel it's already too late, but maybe I should have gone into big data a long time ago. Especially since I'm a bit of a database nerd who cares just a bit too much about how my data is organized.
I guess I'm not the only one who considers working in tech to be fairly unsatisfying and underpaying.
I'm worried about how many people putting 'office culture and work environment' as their top reason to choose a job because I think that it means that 'playground offices' that silicon valley tech companies tend to have are way more effective at keeping staff than I would like to believe.
I remember when I was a kid in the late 90s, I found a statistic that said that computer programmers could make upwards of $150K. The fact that that seems to be the upper limit for the highest tiers in modern inflated currency is a bit sad, but not unexpected.
This whole survey is heavily biased towards "people in the StackOverflow community", and I'm not really sure how to take that. I know that there are lots of answers on StackOverflow, but I've never really participated in it other than reading what people have wrote in it. But the fact that more than 50% of the respondents check it out "almost daily" or more, I'm going to say that further reinforces my earlier Jack-of-all-trades comment. :P
Maybe that also means "it's not a playground office and my employer doesn't have the expectation that I spend the night. It's actually just a job without any bullshit, so that's neat. Good Work environment.". That was my first thought anyway.
That was my first thought as well, until I switched between men, women, and non-binary answers and saw it was about the same. I have to wonder if it's eliciting different responses based on different readings. Like maybe men are thinking, "I have to work with people who like heavy metal and microbrews and use tabs instead of spaces," whereas women are thinking "I have to work someplace where they take gender equality seriously." Seems like too generic of a response to be meaningful in such a large group of people.
Don't take the fact that that was the upper limit on their survey as an indication that it's an upper limit in the real world. It's nowhere near the upper limit. Also, if it's like previous years, they're only counting salary and not stock compensation or other benefits. You can make significantly more than US$150k/year working in tech if you're a skilled engineer, both in salary and in total compensation.
Underpaying is a little surprising. The usual reaction to software salaries on reddit/even hackernews somehow/tildes, especially whenever levels is posted, is some weird mix of people complaining about the salaries being too high. God forbid the greedy developers "stealing" from poor old Google's bank account.
It's cool to see things like Levels getting more and more data. I remember when it was posted to HackerNews early on in its life, and pretty much all they had was basic data on FAANG. Not sure if it's as much of thing in other countries, but it's relatively taboo to discuss compensation in the US, and the more we can break that down, the better (or at least that's my opinion).
Can I ask you why you think this? Because I've been semi-seriously considering making some sort of career in development/software so I'm curious.
Don't be put off by the underpaying part; I just think that developers are generally more valuable than they are paid. A lot of people in the industry always talk about needing to keep swapping between companies in order to get raises because none of the employers think enough of their value to do so.
As far as the unsatisfying part, that's a little bit harder to explain. I think a lot of it comes from the "grass is greaner on the other side" mentality. Basically, most developers want to work on shiny new technologies, but corporate jobs mean doing what you're told.
Right now I work as an analyst at a small company, which is basically to say that I do everything involving technology for them; anything from writing new software to maintaining services and even marketing and sales on the side. Right now the pandemic has made the world go topsy-turvy and I have basically been reduced to a salesman, which means I am extremely unsatisfied with what I am doing. Heck, I'm posting on Tildes right now when I should be working leads.
I wonder if this is an artifact of how hated IBM is in general. Maybe the attachment of IBM's name is worse than even Oracle's name for people who don't know too much about databases who responded to the survey.
I'm surprised they have such a bad reputation, but then again I've never been one of their customers. The only thing I've heard that is really bad with IBM is how they are extremely proprietary and they support a ton of legacy systems.
I think that in the eyes of most of the people who would be responding to the StackOverflow survey, they're the epitome of the company that was once great but is now just a moneyed zombie that refuses to finally die.
They definitely don't have a reputation for building amazing products anymore, and there seems to be a lot of fear whenever they buy a company like Red Hat that people are fans of that they'll end up killing it in an effort to make themselves relevant again.
IBM is certainly hated (or at least "not loved") among the Stack Overflow set, but I don't find it credible that it's more hated than Oracle—Oracle is universally despised among every developer I've ever discussed it with, and essentially always has been.
The love/hate values are normalized by use, which probably explains why DB2 is so high despite not being as widely used.
Ah, that'll do it. Didn't realize the values were normalized. Absolutely makes sense, my experience discussing Oracle with people is effectively the same as yours.
Front-end development is a weird place. In a way, it feels like it should barely exist. You're creating a bunch of text boxes and fill them with data from a database. That takes some work to manage, but why is development a thing in that space? The backend, with security concerns or balancing traffic actually sees huge shifts in volume and best practices, and deals with hardware in a real way but front-end stuff is still mostly... fill some boxes with text.
Obviously, it's mostly HTML/CSS/JS never being intended for what they're used for today, so you have to tame them with thick layers of cruft, which is apparently still an unsolved problem. But man, it's weird that we still don't have some reasonable standard for it that basically automates the process to a point a designer can do it. There's like, literally a thousand frameworks trying to accomplish the exact same thing, reinventing the wheel over and over and over. It's kinda insane.
It also makes me wonder whether sticking with HTML/CSS/JS was a mistake. A modern website doesn't run on a 15 year old browser, we've kinda come to accept that. Why not replace all this shit with something better? Why isn't that an obvious goal we're working towards?
It's a miracle the web exists as is. It took 9 years or so to get mostly full support for the bloody FETCH protocol.
Basically, getting all browser vendors to agree on anything, even with the Google semi-monopoly, is a truly insane amount of work.
There's no way an alternative spec would ever practically get by. It's honestly a miracle the web works as well as it does. Seriously.
Well, agreed. It would require a miracle. But "miracles" do happen and they mostly do at a point where what came before them was identified as being so shitty that a new alternative gained momentum. I'd say much of the web has reached that point.
As for examples: Flash was the only reasonable way to do video when youtube started and it's a dead technology, with HTML5 having more or less completely replaced it by now. Javascript came out of nowhere and is now considered an integral part of the web (obliterating Java applets). For what it's worth, it seems like at least additions to the standard are a thing that happens.
Sure, some sites are still simple displays of content and straightforward forms, and for these there are plenty of tools/services to build them with a simple GUI. Then there are some sites that are full-blown client-side applications in the browser. Most sites are in between, with varying degrees of client-side interactivity, behavior tracking, asynchronous data fetching, complex forms, etc. Front-end developers definitely have a place in the industry.
Also, regarding this:
Is there anyone claiming they're anything other than a minority of developers? They're not even a majority of developers writing for Apple platforms.
Certainly not, but I don't work in a large group and the loudness of the mac crowd tends to get irritating after a while. Don't get me wrong, I get why they act the way they do, but I just get tired of it after a while The PCMR types who prod them to talk about it are honestly more annoying.
Don't take any of these points too seriously; they're just lightweight observation from someone who's a relative outsider.
Interesting to see there's no asexual option for orientation.
I would assume it is counted under the "queer" umbrella term, along with all of the other orientations not specifically listed.